Blair Witch Marketing
I just read a fascinating article in the November 2006 issue of Fast company who has some revolutionary ideas on marketing. By now, everyone interested in marketing has read the story of how the horror movie, The Blair Witch Project It was made for $ 22,000 and fetched $ 248 million at the box office, generating a huge pre-opening “buzz” on the internet long before the public knew they were reading about a movie.
It is the stuff of legends. Chat sites began picking up rumors of three college students who got lost in the woods while on a film school project researching stories about a witch. The children were never heard from again, but their camera was found. The movie inside was restored, revealing horrible sounds in the night forest.
Of course, it was all a hoax, but for a time many on the chat sites were believers. But what was truly remarkable was how the hoax took on a life of its own, even before anyone found out that the supposed film found in the woods would hit theaters. By the time the movie was released, the anticipation had risen to a fever pitch.
Now the three guys who brought you Blair Witch have formed a marketing company called Campfire. They are hired by advertising agencies to create viral marketing campaigns like the one they used to make their movie a big hit.
His work has included Audi’s campaign called “The Art of the Heist,” which lit up websites, blogs, cell phones, message boards, and even had some real-world stunts. The results were better than Audi could have expected, with 2 million visits to its website, 4,000 test drives and 75% more dealer leads.
Campfire’s strategy is to create a story that disaggregates over time on the web and gradually spreads to offline media. They create an addictive mystery that causes people to go online to find out more.
Viral marketing is not a disease, but it is a “rumor” that is passed from one person to another by becoming a topic of conversation like the latest episode of Lost or 24.
The question I keep asking is how duplicable is it? Can story-based viral marketing really be recreated to promote many different products or services? And do these stories have to be hoaxes to work? Couldn’t a mystery unfold virally even though everyone knows it’s still fiction?
Frankly, I still don’t have the answers to all of this (but my little mind is overtime pondering this idea). I wholeheartedly recommend the article in the November issue of Fast Company on page 86. It is definitely food for thought.
COPYRIGHT (C) 2006, Charles Brown. All rights reserved.