The Fortnite Viral Marketing Postcard Sent Me Into a Depressive Spiral, and I'm Not Joking.

The trend of "Company Did Something Weird For Attention" will kill human wonder and creativity, and in exchange, we receive absolutely nothing.

I don't get mail that often. I get bills, sometimes letters from school about the upcoming semester, recently the most exciting piece I got was a reminder to apply for graduation.

Today, I got a black postcard with green writing. On both the front and back, it read "THEY'RE COMING" in block capital letters. No return address, no identifying markers. Each colour was picked carefully, went through some sort of review process. The shapes — a star, two circles, and an asterisk — had been given a subtle teal glow to pop off the page. This had been made by the kind of entity that wanted to eliminate mistakes.

My mother thought it might’ve been from one of my friends. I get art in the mail sometimes because I’m friends with a lot of artists. I said, “No, it’s probably a piece of viral marketing.” I remembered the monoliths of December 2020.

I remembered watching a video of one being put up. In the first several seconds, a YouTube prankster, elevated slightly by Netflix’s infinite capacity to give money to losers, said something like “We need a monolith to promote our Netflix show!” — in that YouTube prankster voice.

The YouTuber they had called was one of those ‘make thing’ types — he was supposed to make the monolith. Instead, they ordered it from a metal manufacturing place. The people who actually made it were on screen for several seconds, loading the hunk of metal into the truck. The video was instead about propping it up in some Australian forest.

Never mind how Epic Games got my address. I’m sure I gave it to them at some point. It’s almost impossible to stay data clean to corporations anymore — one of the leading hypotheses is that Iam8bit gave out a list of ‘Video Game Fan’ addresses, of which I was one.

My mom doesn’t often understand the things that affect me. She likes to keep me excited when she can, and she knows I get a sense of fun from figuring something out. She can also recognize when something immediately kills my mood.

“Maybe it’s a phone number.” she offered, pointing to the 11 digit sequence up one side of the card.

“No, it’s probably just an ad for something.” Even saying that I felt played. I knew that punching “they’re coming postcard” into Google would be playing into their hand. Mine would be part of a collection of searches displayed on a graph to a boardroom of advertising executives. I would become part of the proof that this kind of thing worked, and it would be my fault when it happened again.

“After our postcard, people searched for our campaign [this many] times!” a millennial, struggling to make ends meet, would tell a boardroom of near-senile investors. “People Tweeted [this many] times about Fortnite.” None among the investors would stoop so low as to ask to be reminded what a Tweet was.

Fortnite, since its explosion in 2017, has remained in the top ten most played games for three and a half years. It has enjoyed marketing deals with Disney’s Marvel, Universal Music Distribution Group, and has created careers for its pro-bono advertisers across all personal content production platforms. An estimate by IGN puts the game’s total gross revenue in the range of $10-15 billion USD.

Did they need to do this?

I refused, for even a second, to enjoy the mystery of this postcard. I refuse now, too, to entertain the mystery of “Ex Military Whoever Says Aliens Real,” for another example. I understand, in this present moment, that mystery is now near-universally constructed. I am most curious, when it comes to this postcard, about what breach of privacy handed the Epic Games company my home address. I don’t care about the encrypted message, or whatever inevitable brand of aliens is “coming” — I just don’t want it to happen again.