Blair Witch Marketing
I just read a fascinating article in the November 2006 issue of fast company who has some revolutionary ideas about 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 became $248 million at the box office, generating a huge pre-opening “buzz” on the internet long before audiences even knew they were reading about a movie.
It is the stuff of legends. Chat sites began picking up rumors of three college kids who had gotten lost in the woods while researching stories about a witch in a film school project. The children were never heard from again, but their camera was found. The interior film was restored, revealing horrible sounds in the night forest.
It was, of course, 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 knew that the alleged film found in the woods would hit theaters. By the time the film was released, it had built up feverish-level anticipation.
Now, the three guys who brought you Blair Witch have formed a marketing company called Campfire. They are hired by ad agencies to create viral marketing campaigns like the one they used to make their movie a huge 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 featured some real-world stunts. The results were better than Audi could have hoped for, with 2 million visits to its website, 4,000 test drives and 75% more potential customers in dealerships.
Campfire’s strategy is to create a story that develops over time on the web and gradually spreads to offline media. They create an addictive mystery that has people going online for more information.
Viral marketing is not a disease, but a “buzz” that spreads from one person to another becoming a topic of conversation like the latest episode of Lost or 24.
The question I keep asking is how duplicatable 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 for them to work? Couldn’t a mystery go viral 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 in overtime thinking about this idea). I wholeheartedly recommend the Fast Company November issue article on page 86. It’s definitely food for thought.
COPYRIGHT (C) 2006, Charles Brown. All rights reserved.