Viral marketing! When done well, I’m a fan. When done poorly, or stupidly, I bristle.

Today one of my Paramount PR reps Twittered a website: topsecretconspiracy.com. It’s an obviously fake, pretty funny site about just what it sounds like – conspiracies, with a heaping of the paranormal. I’m assuming this site is a viral for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, especially because Shia’s college roommate in that film is a conspiracy nut. It’s a pretty good site, and there’s some production value; for instance, the site’s ‘creator’ went to a science fiction convention and filmed himself asking people if it was really fiction after all or another way to make truth seekers look stupid. Thanks to a reader named Nick for pointing out the obvious to me – this is a Monsters vs Aliens site! You can, in fact, find the characters hidden throughout the site. Click here to go to the site.

The other site is… weirder. Called Ghostspy, it seems to be making the claim that Ghostbusters 3 is filming right now in New York City, and that the owner of the site is a crew member secretly filming things through a button camera.

First off, I don’t think they’re filming Ghostbusters 3 right now, and while the site never says that’s the movie our guy is working on, it would seem unlikely that it’s not. Or at least it seems likely that he wants us to believe he really is working on Ghostbusters 3.

Where I get confused is that this site is also obviously faked – check out the videos, which include things like our guy getting unrealistically good looks at laptop monitors and obvious acting on the part of other ‘crew’ – but it also obviously bankrolled. Check out this video:

Somebody appears to have legitimately smashed a taxi cab there. That’s not something your every day web hoaxer would be able to do. So what the heck is going on with this site and this footage? I have a feeling we’ll all be disappointed in the end.

Click here to visit Ghostspy (which I found via IESB).