Pretty soon after the internet and email started to become popular advertisers noticed its potential to tap into new markets. This started off with things like banner adverts and pop up adverts but soon the good people of the internet tired of these distractions. Pop up adverts were particularly annoying as they often would produce an army of clones when you closed one, so soon bowser ad-ons were made to automatically close or mask unwanted adverts. This made the advertisers jobs a lot harder because the people they were trying to target would often not see their adverts. Another problem with online advertising was that it was dependent on a user visiting a site that carried the advert so sites that received healthy traffic would cost a lot of money to advertise on, which was a problem if you're representing a small company because you couldn't use the internet to get your word out in a cost effective manner. Then along came viral marketing.
The idea of viral marketing was quite simple: people often send each other emails with funny pictures, videos or inspiring stories and in later years will 'tweet' them or send them over facebook too; if an advert can be sent in this same manner you'll reach a large audience without spending a penny in advertising costs. The trouble is nobody is exactly likely to send someone an advert for no apparent reason. In order to be passed on then, viral campaigns need a decent hook, either something funny or cute, or something strange or mysterious. Cryptozoology certainly fits the bill for strange and mysterious so it comes as no surprise that it has be used, or rather abused, by several viral campaigns over the years. One of the most interesting campaigns was the Giantology campaign.
The campaign was intended to promote the forthcoming game Shadow of the Colossus for the Playstation 2. The game was a fairly limited affair, which saw you fighting a few giants and not much else but was billed as the Playstation's answer to the Legend of Zelda (which is still to this day unanimously agreed to have been the greatest game ever created). Trying to compare the game to something like Zelda was a fatal mistake as it would be the gaming equivalent of buying a copy of The Shawshank Redemption and coming home to find that, due to a mix-up at the manufacturer's, the box contained a Uwe Boll movie. In anycase, the people responsible for the viral campaign played it safe by not mentioning the game at all but trying to get people more interested in giants in general, perhaps reasoning that if there were enough of a buzz about giants then people would want to by a game where you can fight them. To this end they created a fake blog called 'giantology.'
According to posts on the blog it was written by an American man called Eric Belson who described himself as the world's first giantologist who was collecting information on real life giants for a book he was writing. The blog's author tried to add legitimacy to his blog by posting links to several of the more respected Fortean websites of the day like the Fortean Times and the CFZ (we didn't ask or give permission for the record) and by posting links and stories on a number of internet forums.
The blog itself was, although clearly a hoax, actually quite entertaining and clearly a lot of work went into it and can be read here in archived form:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061205062013/http:/giantology.typepad.com/
The blog and several other websites it linked to were designed to look as if they had been put together by non-experts and even contained presumably intentional spelling and formatting errors to complete the authentic feel.
Obviously the proposed book, The Age of Giants, never did materialise and sadly the blog ended abruptly with news that Eric was about to embark on an expedition to South America to investigate one sighting. It would have been a nice touch if the advertisers had properly concluded Eric's story, perhaps with news from his girlfriend Lauren that he was missing in the Andes or something, but at least he provided links to websites claiming hoax or viral marketing in his final post just in case anyone had been too slow to catch on.
Who knows, though, if Sony ever were to make a sequel to Shadow of the Colossus it could follow the modern day adventures of Eric Belson.
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