The 2006 online hunt for Mission: Impossible III invited film fans to participate in the campaign by finding clues across partner websites. Its useful design question is still relevant: how do you turn an intriguing invitation into a sequence people can understand, complete, and leave with a satisfying result?
This is a historical case study and a separate fictional design exercise. The original promotion has ended. The planning lessons below are editorial analysis, rather than a claim that the campaign achieved a measured increase in ticket sales.
What the launch announcement described
The February 3, 2006 launch announcement published by Rotten Tomatoes described a Super Bowl television spot containing an opening clue. The online activity was scheduled to begin the following day and continue over three months. Participants would register as agents, locate badges within partner content, and accumulate marks in an online dossier. Discoveries would reveal code words connected to the film's story.
The Los Angeles Times' own April 2006 announcement also documented promotion of the hunt on its newsracks.
These records establish the announced mechanics and promotional connections. They leave completion rates, participant experience, and incremental ticket sales unresolved. Treat those as unanswered evaluation questions rather than filling the gaps with a success narrative.
Read the design as a participation path
The campaign's premise connected the activity to the film: searching and solving suited the role participants were invited to play. The dossier supplied a place to show progress across separate sites. Those connections help explain the design idea without requiring an assumption about commercial results.
A distributed hunt also creates operational questions. Can someone tell which sites are part of the campaign? What happens when a partner changes a page? Can a returning participant recover progress? Does the experience explain when it ends? These are questions to investigate in any similar design, not documented failures of the 2006 promotion.
Design a smaller hunt before building a large one
On a small screen, scroll the table sideways to read all columns.
| Step | Participant needs | Test before launch |
|---|---|---|
| Invitation | The purpose, expected effort, and ending | Can a new visitor explain what they are agreeing to do? |
| Clue | A clear question and reachable evidence | Can it be solved without guessing hidden interface behavior? |
| Answer | Accepted formats and useful error feedback | Do reasonable spelling and formatting variations work? |
| Progress | A reliable record of completed steps | What happens on refresh, interruption, or a return visit? |
| Completion | The promised result and a clear next choice | Does the reward load and does the experience end cleanly? |
Make clues accessible and recovery understandable
Give instructions in text, provide appropriate alternatives for essential visual or audio information, and make the controls work with a keyboard. A color-only cue can prevent some people from finding the answer. A deliberately difficult puzzle still needs an understandable interface.
The W3C forms tutorial explains labels, instructions, validation, and feedback that can help participants submit answers and recover from errors. Review the entire experience with assistive technology and representative users; checking one form field leaves the broader puzzle untested.
Collect only the information the design needs and explain its purpose. If accounts, prizes, children, or public submissions enter the design, resolve the applicable privacy, promotion, moderation, and safeguarding requirements before launch. A simple prototype can avoid those additional mechanisms while the core activity is evaluated.
Plan support, measurement, and closure
Assign an owner to each clue, destination, answer rule, and support route. Keep a fallback when a linked page changes. If participants can post content, define review and reporting responsibilities and test those tools. State the closing date and what will remain available afterward.
Measure starts, successful steps, requests for hints, abandonment points, and completions using stated counting rules. Use participant feedback to distinguish a satisfying challenge from a broken instruction. Completion describes participation; it does not demonstrate that the activity caused a purchase.
Download the hunt design and closure review to map the fictional prototype and plan your own checks. For the opening invitation and its destination, read Super Bowl advertising; for broader campaign planning, see online marketing.