With respect to Captain Jack Sparrow, Superman and Ricky Bobby, no single summer blockbuster has enjoyed the same amount of pre-release hype as the divinely-titled Snakes On A Plane [SoaP]. Buoyed by an early tidal wave of did-they-really-call-it-that-powered hype, the Samuel L. Jackson picture was an Internet meme as far back as 2005, a full year before its release. Since then, thanks in no small part to forward-minded support from New Line Cinema's marketing department, the film's enormous word-of-mouth has spun off an enormously fertile network of SoaP-themed online initiatives, ranging from blogs and forums to fan-edited trailers and theme song contests.

One of the most impressive bits of marketing from the campaign debuted in mid-August. Powered by patented web technology from the Chicago and Los Angeles-based startup Varitalk, snakesonaplane.com introduced a feature wherein users could send a personalized voicemail from Jackson to a friend. Give the applet your friend's first name, phone number, and a few personal details (such as job, favorite hobby, etc), and it relays a seamlessly concatenated voicemail to their mobile. In its web debut on the week starting August 10, the site generated an incredible 3,750,000 visitors and 1,015,500 messages, with growth still trending exponentially upwards.

"Every single day I come to work expecting it to stop surprising me, and it never does," says Varitalk managing partner Frederick Lowe, who has worked on smaller projects with agencies like Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, Wieden + Kennedy and RG/A in the past. "[New Line] is miles ahead in their thinking of just about anybody right now with respect to what it means to get out of the way of their brand and let these consumers who have come to expect they're going to participate in the marketing of the project, to give them the tools to do it and then get out of the way." If there's a lesson to be learned from New Line, Lowe says it's about willingness to cede a bit of control. "At brands all over right now, there are people saying 'What happens if we do this and we don't control the message', but these folks fought the good fight." And while SoaP will ultimately go down as the campaign by which all future online marketing campaigns are judged, some think the Jackson voicemail generator missed a crucial detail. Says Lowe: "Every day I get emails saying, 'Why doesn't this thing say 'motherf**ker'?"

Snakes On A Plane> http://www.snakesonaplane.com
Snakes On A Blog> http://www.snakesonablog.com
Varitalk> http://www.varitalk.com