The 4400 has taken to viral marketing dramatically in order to build the word before the upcoming fourth season of the TV show.  According to AdWeek:

To promote the new season of The 4400 on USA Network, Campfire has created a wide-ranging interactive world consisting of 80 videos that run from 30 seconds to five minutes and six Web sites. […] The 4400 follows 4,400 people who are abducted, taken away and then returned to planet Earth. After their return, many of them discover they have superpowers. As the fourth season begins on June 17, the plot follows the development of a drug called Promicin: it gives the users superpowers, if it doesn’t kill them. Three different factions emerge around the drug: pro, anti- and neutral.

On YouTube, for example, one of the show’s stars, Billy Campbell, appears in character as Jordan Collier, advocating Promicin and the decrying the government’s attempts to ban the drug.  Here’s Jordan Collier dispatch #3:

Elsewhere on the net, we can find the Promicin Power website, which argues that Promicin is the key to world peace and a sustainable relationship with nature.  Here’s one example that looks like it could be have been a United Colours of Bennetton advertisement in a past life:

At the other extreme, there’s also Promicin Terror which sees the drug as the biggest threat to the US since Al Qaeda.  Clearly building on the famous ‘Daisy‘ political ad of the 60s (which was recycled in the US debates about the War with Iraq), this is an example  of a clip campaigning to ban the drug:

I quite enjoyed the last season of The 4400 and am heartened to see the show’s producers so actively embracing the potential of video-sharing and online word-of-mouth.  The clips are a little over-produced, but given the state of a lot of TV advertising today, I’m sure they could easily be mistaken for the ‘real thing’.