Sony-Ericsson’s much anticipated Xperia X1 goes on sale today, supported by alternate reality marketing

But does a phone as exciting as the X1 need additional hype? The blogs have been buzzing about this phone since the first sneak peek in Barcelona back in February.

The trailer does look pretty cool — kind of like the movie Memento — with lots of Asian city scenes. It seems that Johnny X has lost his memory and is mixed up with some dodgy characters. He buys an X1 and begins to put the pieces together again. Check out the full version here. Or watch the trailer below.

ARG! It’s not so easy!

However, alternate reality games (ARG) marketing doesn’t always work so well. Recently the team at IO9 had a flop on their hands.

Between the giant banners advertising the D-9 alternate reality game (ARG) with anti-alien slogans, beyond the Dharma Initiative recruitment booth, there was a little stack of postcards at Comic-Con that read “You are being deceived — www.youarebeingdeceived.com.” It was the calling card for an ARG that nobody saw. How do I know? Because io9 built the You Are Being Deceived ARG, complete with a phone number you can call and two mysterious linked URLs, as an experiment in marketing and mass deception. What happens when you try to deceive people but your lies are drowned out by better-funded lies? Allow me to recount our strange tale.

We had grown sick of all the ARG marketing schemes for movies like The Dark Knight, which try to drum up fan support and brand recognition for forthcoming franchises with semi-mysterious websites and phone numbers and instructions on where to buy a cake that has an iPhone in it. Profoundly uncreative, the Batman ARG had done little more than inspire a lot of people to wear Joker makeup. While other ARGs are more fun and thought-provoking, we felt that in general ARG-making had become so bland that you could practically never tell what the games were about. They’re little more than walk-in ads.

What’s more likely is that nobody saw our ARG because we didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars to promote it. We printed out 1000 postcards, and thought we’d just hand them out to people — even if only a few saw it, they might blog about it and it could spread via word-of-mouth.

Ah, you say with a cynical smile, you are so naive. Did you really think you puny creatures with your 1000 cheap postcards printed with a URL could put even a tiny dent in the promotional juggernaut that is Comic-Con? The simple answer is yes, we really did. I think that’s partly because we’d actually fallen for the ARG hype, despite the fact that we’d criticized it and should have known better. We imagined that ARGs really could be kind of grassroots and DiY, and that people would want to go to a cool URL like YouAreBeingDeceived. We thought our snarky little ARG might stir up some shit. But we deceived ourselves.

ARGs are not grassroots. They are not about community, or word-of-mouth. They really are about saturating the market with brands in order to generate interest in something, just the way old-fashioned advertising is. I don’t mean to disparage the cleverness of ARGs — a lot of them are terrifically fun. But the ARGs that get noticed at a media event like Comic-Con are always going to be the ones with lots of resources behind them.

There’s no doubt that Johnny X has gotten noticed, but he will likely be forgotten faster than you can say “Where did I leave my new phone?”