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The Internet services company will tie in its AIM client to a scavenger hunt based on forthcoming movie Cry Wolf.

Chrysler will have one of its new Crossfire vehicles as the grand prize for the winner of its IM In The Hunt game. The promotion, like the movie Cry Wolf, both feature AOL's AIM service as a focal feature.

In the September 23rd movie about a prep campus-stalking serial killer, students send rumors about the killer's next victims via AIM. It's an advanced bit of product placement for AOL, which has been rapidly expanding its reach to the more publicly available Internet.

The movie's two directors started out by submitting a short film to a Chrysler sponsored film contest, the 2002 Extreme Filmmaking Competition. They won the contest and subsequently used their opportunity to make the movie by shooting it in their home state of Virginia.

Of course, Virginia is home to AOL, and its placement in the movie has been paralleled by this attempt to generate interest outside of traditional marketing and ad efforts. The IM In The Hunt contest will involve answering questions via instant messaging.

Trailers for the movie will be shown on about 2,000 screens, and at the end of the trailer will be a prompt to join the contest. Through the summer, AIM will deliver horror-related questions via text messaging, which users will respond to with either TRUTH or LIE, depending on the veracity of the question.

AOL plans to award a number or prizes through the contest, and to bring a few winners to Los Angeles to play a real-time scavenger hunt with cast members from the Cry Wolf film. That hunt will culminate in one winner finding the Crossfire grand prize.

The promotional effort moves advertising well beyond the television or even the PC web browser. It will be interesting to see if this effort can bring about the sort of viral' buzz that the Blair Witch Project did with its Internet efforts.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.