Neither is Sony. They’ve been doing some interesting marketing for 2012, their new Post-apocalyptic blockbuster, staring John Cusack and Amanda Peet. Actually, I haven’t really seen them do a whole lot of marketing at all. It seems like their trying to follow in the footsteps of Cloverfield, attempting the same kind of mystery driven, viral marketing that created so much anticipation for J. J. Abrams’ film except Sony’s bad at it.

The movie trailer is brief, showing a huge title wave overtaking the Himalayas while posing the question of what the leaders of the world do to prepare everyone for the end of days. It then cuts to the title and ends. Now, this would be fine if we all didn’t already know what the movie was about. The problem is that everyone’s heard about the 2012 thing. It’s like trying market Titanic by keeping the ending a secret. The trailer ultimately fails on two leaves, it doesn’t create the curiosity it was intended to and ends up wasting the time it could have spent showing me cool disasters and stuff that would have made want to see this movie.

So the trailer sucks bad and, believe it or not, so does everything else. Aside from the trailer, the only other ongoing promotion I’ve come accross is a fake website called The Institute for Human Continuity. It’s on the front page of Myspace right now and like the movie trailer, it really fails to accomplish a whole lot. With no reference to the movie or Sony, beyond the question posed in the trailer, I wasn’t sure it was even related to the movie until I clicked their terms of service and was directed to a the Sony Pictures site. In it’s defense, it is a very nice site and it was obviously much more expensive then your average end of the world page. It also got me wondering why Antarctica had, so far, signed up for the most end of the world lottery tickets then I found out that’s where their building the underground city. duh.

Despite Sony’s awful advertising you might actually be interested in finding out more about this movie. Well there’s good news, you can Goggle it. Sony’s been working hard and it ranks second for the movie’s title, directly under a link to a Wikipedia article about the date.

As a side note, I found some fun links while looking for stuff about this movie one of which I wanted to share. Geddongear.com, your post apocalyptic superstore, claims to be the official sponsor of the 2012 apocalypse and sells survival gear such as a satellite free GPS (map) and various end of the world t-shirts.