Manchurian Global
Project type:
Movie promotion
In support of:
Manchurian Candidate (Paramount)
Date:
Spring-Summer 2004
Description:
One of the changes made in the remake of Manchurian Candidate is that the 
entity behind the conspiracy in the movie is no longer China, but an evil corporation -- "... rich people funding bad science to put a sleeper in the White House...". Appropriately enough, this corporation, Manchurian Global has its own website, at www.manchurianglobal.com. There's no explicit link from the main Manchurian Candidate site to here; rather, the designers purchased biotech-related ad words on Yahoo to bring up pointers to the site (consider this Yahoo news story in the Google cache.
It's a nicely done faux web site, looking just like a typical boring corporate site -- descriptions of the company, its executives, their areas of business, press releases, and so on. A bit of site exploration reveals a video of one of the company's scientists talking about their work with the human genome, and how"...with a flick of the wrist we can adjust character... change personality". Hmm.... A click on the movie opens a web page on the main Manchurian Candidate site, providing the promotional payoff for the site.
There would appear to be other things going on within the site; in particular, there is a "limited partners extranet", suggesting additional secrets if only you can guess the proper username/password. Unfortunately, none of my guesses have worked, so there's little I can say. This obviously cuts into the promotional value of the site -- if you're going to have a secret area in a site like this, you've got to have enough clues around that the secret gets out. But, overall, it's a nice addition to the movie's promotion at what was probably rather little expense.
entity behind the conspiracy in the movie is no longer China, but an evil corporation -- "... rich people funding bad science to put a sleeper in the White House...". Appropriately enough, this corporation, Manchurian Global has its own website, at www.manchurianglobal.com. There's no explicit link from the main Manchurian Candidate site to here; rather, the designers purchased biotech-related ad words on Yahoo to bring up pointers to the site (consider this Yahoo news story in the Google cache.It's a nicely done faux web site, looking just like a typical boring corporate site -- descriptions of the company, its executives, their areas of business, press releases, and so on. A bit of site exploration reveals a video of one of the company's scientists talking about their work with the human genome, and how"...with a flick of the wrist we can adjust character... change personality". Hmm.... A click on the movie opens a web page on the main Manchurian Candidate site, providing the promotional payoff for the site.
There would appear to be other things going on within the site; in particular, there is a "limited partners extranet", suggesting additional secrets if only you can guess the proper username/password. Unfortunately, none of my guesses have worked, so there's little I can say. This obviously cuts into the promotional value of the site -- if you're going to have a secret area in a site like this, you've got to have enough clues around that the secret gets out. But, overall, it's a nice addition to the movie's promotion at what was probably rather little expense.