Resolved: “viral” (I know, I hate the word too) movie marketing peaked with Cloverfield; we are now watching its record-fast decline towards rock bottom as regular marketing guys shove regular campaigns into unimaginative, unconvincingly “alternative” wrappings.

Exhibit A: At Movie Marketing Madness a couple of days ago, Chris Thilk detailed the many ways that Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s campaign rubs him the wrong way. From the no-comments-allowed fake character blog to the billboards and bus ads that wreck any chance of playing as organic interventions by incorporating URLS and MPAA ratings, Chris says, “If this is the best a studio can do in terms of social media then…marketers have no place in this space.”

Exhibit B: Defamer points to this “ad” (maybe a generous assessment for a piece of paper taped to a tree) which takes the Sarah Marshall campaign’s familiar, Sharpie-scripted petulant, turns it away from the title character and towards said tree. I missed the film when it premiered at SXSW, but I have to wonder if this is an effort to fix another problem cited by Thilk, in that the fake blog posts “seem to exist after the events of the movie”––is there a bit in Sarah Marshall about a tree that this could be slyly referring to? Either the studio is responding to such criticism by steering the campaign towards attention-grabbing non-sequitors,  or they’ve been detourned by actual, semi-inventive spontaneity on the part of their annoyed audience.

I’ll leave the discussion up to you, but I will say that it does strike me that worrying about Marshall’s marketing is just a manifestation of total indifference to the movie itself (as Defamer commenter ricker puts it, “I think I’m going to forget to see Sarah Marshall.”) With the Judd Apatow backlash gaining steam with each successive disappointing release, maybe Sarah never had the chance to dodge the increasing taint of lameness bestowed by its brand-name producer. After all, aren’t we about at the point where a new Apatow-associated product is, like, the Destiny Turns on the Radio to Knocked Up’s Pulp Fiction?