Yesterday, the website for the Rossum Corporation — the nefarious technology company that operates the Dollhouses — launched. On its face, it's a standard corporate website, touting the remarkable abilities of Rossum's technological advances. It also outlines the terms and conditions for becoming a Rossum client, and includes a response to Senator Daniel Perrin's allegations of illegal and unethical activities perpetrated by Rossum.

But the rabbit hole goes a bit deeper. One of the posters at Whedonesque called Rossum's corporate phone number and received a call back, ordering them to "Ditch the tech." The poster then found the Ditch the Tech website, which displays the video below:

The site also includes these anti-cell phone fliers:

Another Whedonesque reader noted the site's source code includes the following information:

Civilization will fall apart in the year 2019. The Rossum Corporation is responsible. It is already beginning at the L.A. Dollhouse right now. Don't let them wipe the future!

And it appears there will be more Dollhouse teasers forthcoming. Another reader found a link to the site Wipe the Future, which for now only includes the text, "Soon."

[Whedonesque]

Attendees to San Diego Comic-Con may have found themselves accosted by very friendly corporate scouts at the Marvel booth last week, being told that they were perfect recruitment material for Stark Industries, and being given business cards directing them to this website, which - as well as Tony Stark's note to the world about what Stark Industries is (not) doing nowadays, also lets you apply for a job with an online interview asking such questions as "A plane flying past a non-moving observer has kinetic energy in the reference frame of this observer, the same plane has how much kinetic energy in the reference frame which moves with the plane?" and "What is your greatest hope for human kind?" (It also mentions something called "intelecrop technology" - a hint for the new movie, perhaps...?). Applicants receive the message "THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST IN STARK INDUSTRIES. WE WILL CONTACT YOU IF YOUR SKILLS MEET OUR REQUIREMENTS," meaning that we'll be checking our inboxes for new material momentarily.
In the meantime, Marvel's website can keep you occupied with three behind-the-scenes reports about the movie, dropping hints about what to expect next summer, including War Machine, the (re)discovery of a new element - which may or may not be related to the work of Tony Stark's father during the Manhattan Project - and Jon Favreau talking about what happens after Stark's public announcement that he is Iron Man at the end of the first movie:

What would really happen if you do that? How do your enemies and friends react? How much attention do you draw to yourself? Fame in general has a good side and bad side…You get tremendous adulation and you become bigger than life in some sort of ways; and in other ways, you become John Lennon. He's definitely living under pressure but he's not introverted.

And all of this almost a year before the movie comes out. Can you imagine what it'll be just before May 7th, 2010?

The District 9 website goes some way towards selling you on the movie's concept, of a dark future where aliens come to Earth in friendship, only to be locked up in camps. The site's front page forbids non-humans from entering the site, and once inside, you're greeted with a panoramic display of a wasteland with an alien sillhouette practice target covered with bullet holes. There are links to some of the movie's viral sites, including the evil corporation MNU and an anti-MNU site. Plus wallpapers (see above.)

The Warehouse 13 site is a bit more fun — you can "chat" with the Warehouse's keeper, Artie (Saul Rubinek) who pops up via a video. And there are a bunch of index cards with names of weird artifacts stored in the warehouse, like Dillinger's Pistol, which you can learn about. More excitingly, you can type in the name of a random artifact you've found, and Artie will tell you if it belongs in the warehouse. I typed in, "Space dildo," and Artie hemmed and hawed, and finally said he didn't really have anything about that in his files.

Apparently Syfy is promoting this site by having weird tags attached to items at flea markets in Brooklyn and L.A., saying that the items may belong in the warehouse and you need to check on the website. Also, some items on eBay will have digital versions of the tag, which is sort of a nifty kind of viral marketing.

The character Charlie Frost looks like a lunatic hippie, mixed with a bit of shock jock. I know I was against Woody being involved in this ridiculous picture, about the world ending according to the Mayan calendar, but I take it all back - all of it. This was the role he was born to play or he's just not acting. Seriously, take away the hair and I this exactly what I would imagine Woody Harrelson is like in real life. Wearing ponchos, driving around in a camper, talking about government conspiracy theories - and then we'd all go get high from the remnants of his now defunct "oxygen bar." I'm for Charlie Frost and his over the top, crazy-eyes viral videos, especially when he hits on caller Linda in the "Super Volcanoes" clip. They're cute and remind me a little of Independence Day.

As for the rest of 2012, well I still don't have the highest of hopes for the struggling limo driver/writer Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) who has to win back the respect of his family and keep them save from the apocalypse. Seems like a lot of juggling - but it is Cusack, so fingers crossed.

Charlie Frost's Animation

Doomsday Seed Bank:

Nanotechnology:

Super Volcanoes

The Institute for Human Continuity (IHC) Lottery

Check out Charlie's website, This Is The End.

At first glance, Total Conspiracy is just a hilariously awesome conspiracy site, including pictures of flying dogs, alien coins (from the U.S. Treasury), and alien-influenced mathematicians. It's chock full of weird ranty videos by sitemaster Jeffrey Freedman, and essays on things like flu vaccines as an alien scheme to weaken us. (And I love the whole thing in the video, where he demands to know if the government had anything to do with the death of Robert Heinlein.)

But eagle-eyed reader James pointed me to the science fiction book covers in the latest video, posted above. Not only do they have great parody titles like Weirdo In A Weird Land, Probed: A Love Story, Scales Of Fear, The Boy Who Forgot The Time, Welcome To Our New Mechanical Overlords, My Big Fat GIant Revenge, and I Have No Brain And I Must Yell. But they also feature MVA characters like Bob (the blob), Dr. Cockroach PhD, Ginormica and a couple others.

Could this, too, be a conspiracy? Could Dreamworks be controlling the mind of an innocent UFO conspiracy nut, trying to get him to promote their movie? Only you can decide, by exposing your truth. [Top Secret Conspiracy, thanks James!]

Several months ago, when images of these whirly, spikey drones started appearing in UFO forums around the world, we investigated one possible explanation offered for them. Many people claimed they were the work of a special effects designer, Kris Avery, who used the images in a music video online. But we interviewed Avery, who told us in no uncertain terms that he had just incorporated images he found online into the video.

Now that the ships have appeared on Sarah Connor Chronicles, it seems as if the people claiming that they were a viral marketing campaign were right all along. Over at Screenrant, there's a terrific breakdown of the timeline of the images appearing, along with carefully-labeled comparisons of the leaked images passed around in UFO forums and the ships that appeared in the episode. (The image above is one of the comparison images from Screenrant.)

While it's possible the designers at SCC simply used images they'd found online and incorporated them into the show, it's more likely that they were always intended as a viral campaign but that it got derailed by the writers' strike. That would explain the long delay time between the images showing up online, and then showing up in the series. And who knows whether they'll play a role in the upcoming Terminator film? These could be evil cyborg drones, not UFOs at all.

UPDATE: It turns out that the designers at SCC did not invent these images after all. In fact, as I suggested above, they "simply used images they'd found online." SCC Producer Josh Friedman piped up in comments below to say, in part:

I'm not sure if this will put an end to this but I will assure you that the incorporation of drone-like imagery into TSCC should not in any way suggest there was/is a relationship between the original drone images and our show. The drone images are as much a puzzle to me as to anybody else...Maybe more so, as my obsession with their mysterious origins led me to go on and on about them in the writers' room...So much so that we ultimately used the mystery as a platform for "Earthlings Welcome Here."

After visiting the faceless website, we noticed the Lotus logo which directly links you to the cars website. All this for a car no one can afford?

[via dlisted]

Octagon says it'll be in San Diego on July 24th through the 27th, and all us indoor kids know those dates are obviously Comic-Con. What does Dharma have in store for the con, and more importantly why are some of these volunteer positions unpaid? I can see skimping on paying the mini-bus driver, but the scientists?

On the viral site, it explains that there's a new research project coming up and Dharma will need many people to do research and assist in unpaid positions. Methinks this may be how ABC will secure their summer interns this year. Or at least find a group of innocent victims to do their viral marketing bidding.

Jobs Listed:
Meteorologists
Parapsychologists
Zoologists
Physicists
Mathematicians
Botanical Researchers
Engineers
Builders
Drivers
Health Care Workers
Communication Specialists
Neuroscientists
Janitors
Engineers
Biologists
Astrophysicists
Ex-Military
Electricians
Vets
IVF Consultants
Teachers
Architects
Ichthyologists
Transport Mechanics
Immunologists
Nurses
Illustrators
Auditors
Minibus Drivers
Recycling Coordinators
Aeronautical Engineers
Horticulturists
Dentists
[Octagon Recruiting]

Here's a closeup up the ship.

And here are a couple schematics from "anonymous."



Please do let this be from the upcoming X-Files movie. Or even better, some other movie that I haven't heard about yet.

UFO Reports Draw National Attention to Capitola [San Jose Mercury News]

Hewlett Packard used a service called PayPerPost to pay bloggers to create posts or viral videos to promote Hewlett Packard's new digital camera. One woman had her children smash a Fuji camera with a hammer, filmed it, and put it on YouTube. The video didn't actually catch on virally, but did represent a strange and disturbing new phase in the evolution of advertising. A woman who clearly just wanted to feed her kids actually used her kids in a specious ad campaign in order to earn cash. This isn't the only time companies have tried this kind of stunt — paying bloggers a pittance to develop advertising for rich advertising firms — and it's bound to become more popular as more people get their entertainment via places like YouTube. In fact, Hewlett Packard had a much more successful viral ad campaign two years ago, in which people playing "finger soccer" on their desks at work and uploading the vids to YouTube were eventually outed as part of an ad campaign to make HP seem as cool and fun as Apple. By the time the outing happened, however, hundreds of people had spontaneously joined the "finger soccer" campaign just for fun, not realizing that the videos they uploaded were part of a viral advertising effort.

Another recent ad campaign that tried to use Web communities to generate artificial buzz was internet hardware manufacturer Cisco's "human network" campaign. You may remember seeing the phrase "human network" in Cisco ads, but Cisco wanted to do more than create a slogan. They wanted people to start using the phrase "human network" as everyday slang for the internet — the idea, I think, would be to cement a connection in people's unconscious minds between Cisco, the internet, and a kind of Utopian "human network" (which Cisco hardly is, given that its technology is what makes the Great Firewall of China possible). According to digital marketing blog ChasNote:

Since the "human network" isn't yet a well-defined phrase, [Cisco] enlisted thought leaders to volunteer their own definitions, without guidance from Cisco or Ogilvy. Contributors included a handful of FM authors, such as Boing Boing's David Pescovitz, 43Folders's Merlin Mann, Metafilter's Matt Haughey, GigaOM's Om Malik, Wi-Fi Networking News's Glenn Fleishman, Newsvine's Mike Davidson, XYZ Computing's Sal Cangeloso, TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, Searchblog's John Battelle and Make's Phil Torrone. These authors penned their thoughts and plugged them into Cisco ads on their own sites. The ads then invite readers to visit a Cisco landing page that hosts definitions from other thought leaders and gives them an opportunity to vote for a favorite. If they don't see a definition that gets it right, they can also click to the "human network" page at Wikia (a collection of freely-hosted wiki communities built on the same software as Wikipedia) to edit the definition there.

Why are these campaigns a harbinger of things to come? First of all, they are directly engaged with a form of media — social networks — that are only likely to grow bigger as time goes on. Advertising can't only be those little tiny Google ads that go up the side of the page, and advertisers are going to do everything they can to become part of the content on a YouTube or Facebook so that they are more closely woven into the fabric of those networks. After all, you go to YouTube to see wacky videos, not to read the ads. So if advertisers can infiltrate the videos and make you watch their stuff, it's as if you've voluntarily tuned into a TV ad.

This is more disturbing than what I guess you could call traditional advertising mainly because a lot of it is extremely misleading. Ads that are "teasers" are one thing — you know, putting some cool phrase or image out there, only to reveal that it's an Altoids ad three weeks later. But ads that pretend to be real endorsements from regular people? That hide their corporate sponsorship, and use the ideas of underpaid people? It's like turning YouTube into a marketing sweatshop. Advertising dystopia, here we come.

For one thing, the synopsis gets enough stuff right that it seems to come from someone who actually had seen the movie. Even the most obsessive fan wouldn't have known those details back when this review got posted. Then there's the fact that it spends so much time referencing viral marketing crap, like the Japanese Slusho! drink and the evil Tagruato Corporation. Again, an obsessive fan might have thrown that stuff in, but it looks more like someone trying to keep up the dizzy dance of viral marketing a little while longer. We love the part where the faker swears he/she doesn't work for Bad Robot, J.J.'s production company.

The question is, how much does it cost to pay someone to post fake spoilers on IMDB? We're curious! Does anybody know?

The rest of the viral footage is pretty boring, especially if you don't speak Spanish, Italian or German. The gist is that the drilling platform belongs to a shadowy Japanese corporation called Tagruato (which is by no means a real Japanese name.) There's also a new viral site from a fake environmentalist group called TIDO that opposes Tagruato's deep-sea drilling. TIDO is suspected of having destroyed the drilling station somehow, but denies responsibility. Here's more footage of the oil rig going under:

Also, J.J. Abrams' hard-working interns updated the MySpace page for Rob, the movie's main character. The new updates confirm that Rob is moving to Japan, to work for the company that makes Slusho!, the drink featured in the movie. (Any guesses what mysterious company that might be?) I have a feeling most of this backstory will only end up being referenced tangentially in the actual movie, and the little references will add an extra layer of meaning to the handful of people who followed all these clues down their various ratholes.

Update: Commenter CAPN_MARRRRK points out that you can see the video in English here. Some of the shaky cam footage turns out to be a camera phone.

[MovieMarketingMadness]