the grass is greener on the internet

I find myself in a very unique position on this lazy holiday afternoon, refreshing a Facebook page over and over again.

No, I’m not stalking the guest list for tonight’s party…I’m trying to re-find an ad after being too trigger happy with the ‘close’ button.

There are few banner ads we actually respond to, but in a recession it’s a pretty good bet that there will be people looking for jobs. It grabs your attention.

Then you look at the picture. And the text. It becomes pretty clear that it’s not a real job. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.

But the idea of a job involving ‘non-humans’ sounds a bit quirky, and you wonder what on earth it could be. It captures your interest.

So yes, I clicked. And not surprisingly, it’s part of an integrated online campaign for a new movie, District 9.

They seem to have avoided the Facebook page/news feed/Twitter combination which is apparently standard now-a-days, opting for an interactive, media-heavy network of three sites.

The first, linked from the ad, is the ‘Multi-National United’ site with job postings, overviews of a mysterious company and a countdown headed ’20 years in the making’. The other two sites explore different aspects of the movie’s plot.

Integrated marketing is difficult because each part has to tell its own story while still linking into a whole. The Matrix is a great example. The movie was one part, but the story was also built up through secret sites, codebreaking, games and other artistic works based on the same philsophy and alternate reality.

In this case, all they need to do to sell the movie is create enough interest that when you see the name District 9 outside a cinema one lazy afternoon you’ll think ‘hey…why not’.

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Being always on the lookout for more facebook ads to bring you, I will of course be on the lookout on my upcoming birthday, as I hear advertisers can now target ads specifically to the lucky facebook users. You’ve been warned.

**May not be actual text or pictures, graphic the property of Sony. No humans or non-humans were harmed in the making of this picture.