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CyrusFox Searchlight (or the internet marketing company they hired) recently unveiled Notmileycyrus.com, the new campaign for Cyrus starring Jonah Hill, John C. Reilly and Marisa Tomei. We'll let our friends at Moviefone discuss the merits of the movie, but a quick note to the brains behind the site in a language they will surely understand: Epic Fail.

It's not that you guys didn't have good intentions. Despite its star power, Cyrus is still very much an indie movie that only opened up in a handful of theaters and, publicity-wise, needs all the help it can get. So you created a fake website portal containing no less than 17 different links to other sites you created. The sites, with domains like iwillknockyouout.com and imablast.net, are a compendium of clips from the movie, YTMND sites, Tumblr blogs and dead links designed to look like the internet circa 1995.

CyrusWith a few exceptions, though -- soundslikestevemiller.com does have an eerily soothing, ethereal quality -- the whole thing reeks of artifice, even if you don't expect anyone to believe that this is the work of a devoted group of fans. Why does this campaign fail? It tries too hard. It reminds us of our drunk uncle thinking it's funny if he tries to rap, or our parents using slang they heard "the kids" say on TV.

We're not against corporations trying to get into the viral video/marketing world. When Hi-Tec secretly released their Liquid Mountaineering video, allegedly showing a group of guys training to walk on water, we marveled at the ingenuity and, admittedly, thought for a second, "This can't be real. Can it?" Its effectiveness lied in its plausibility, subtlety and creativity. It was able to stand on its own as a clever video without the obvious product shill that went along with it. Notmileycyrus.com goes the other way, undermining viewers' intelligence and assuming that if you throw a bunch of popular viral techniques against the wall, one of them has to stick.

CyrusThe line between organic trend-spreading and corporate shilling is a difficult one to discern in 2010. In just one of countless examples, Greyson Chance, the 12-year old pianist who became a sensation after someone posted footage of him covering Lady Gaga's 'Paparazzi' on YouTube, has been rumored to be a fully-thought out concoction of Universal Records and not the organic viral sensation many were led to believe. We don't think the folks behind Notmileycyrus.com are actually trying to make us believe this is an organic site (if they do, well, that's another rant). It just seems like the new viral marketing is the product of a group of ad men sitting in a boardroom trying to capitalize on what they think (or hear) is cool. Almost everything pure, if it gets popular enough, gets corrupted at some point in its life cycle. But then again, maybe Fox Searchlight comes out the big winner. I mean, we did just spend 500 words talking about the site, right?