Agreed. As for viral marketing it is by far the cheapest and best method of advertising. Tv and radio have the worst ROI. Besides, MSFT had become masters of viral, with the launch of hotmail, I don't think any other viral campaign is/was as effective as that one. However, Halo made them a helluva lot more money. As far as being sick of viral campaigns...umm, there is a pretty easy fix for that, don't go to the damn page.
What are you talking about, "launch of hotmail"? Hotmail is a company MS bought up in the later half of the 90s, they didn't invent it (webmail), they create it and they certainly never launched it, since it was already launched by the time they took over ownership.
Ahh them were the days, just a a group of guys going to college, and play hardball with MS to sell your webmail for 450mil....., they think they could have got a billion, but they got scared.
One thing about viral marketing is that it creates a mystique about a certain product. They have a ton of straight-forward "XBOX 360 COMING THIS NOVEMBER BUY BUY BUY!" advertisements.. but when you get people talking about a mysterious website or strange videos (in the case of the Serenity movie and its River-based viral marketing) it gains a sort of cult following. It gives it credibility in the underground. A response like, "Hey, that's pretty clever.. that's pretty interesting.. that's smart. I'll check it out." ...
Actually if you look at the Javascript, the counter is updating every 1.5 seconds. So the end of the countdown is actually Nov 21, so it's probably just a launch countdown.
Just saw the Serenity movie. Had no idea there was a viral marketting campaign. Had the had a site about River's history and advertised as such I'd likely have been interested to take a look/ If good and done well, maybe. All to often though (though it's in it's infancy, scarily) VM is neither clever nor interesting. Like that latin on the tree in Origen, and all the people piecing clues together to think it was something about Halo or what have you, and it turned out to be a competition and all the 'clues' had absolutely nothing to do with anything.
I wanted to make a smart remark like this, but any reference to coding is an instant ban. lol funny though
Typing the words on the things references other words... type in "good" you get "halo3" and vice-versa along with a color. I dunno what the point is. Also, it seems we can all control it, for instance I can form a message and somebody responds, like a bunch of kids with a puzzle. The heck's the point is beyond me though...