The Rise and Pseudo-Success of Viral Marketing

People tend to think viral marketing is a relatively new thing, but it's actually almost a decade old. In the lead-up to 1999's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, word got out that if you did a Google search for "Jeanine Salla," you would find a website about a woman living in the future, doing research on A.I. children. That website linked to other sites with even more information, and collectively they all told a story related to the robotics company seen in the film. (Most of the websites are still up; try it for yourself.)

Back then it was simply an experiment - something cool for the marketing department to tinker around with to see if it would work. And, truth be told, there was no evidence that it did work - A.I. topped out with less than $80 million at the box office. But it seemed to open the floodgates for a bunch of new films.

The appeal behind such unconventional marketing is simple - it makes the fictional world of a film more "real." In 2004's Godsend, Robert De Niro plays a doctor who promises to give a married couple's dead child back to them. If you went online, you could find the website for the Godsend Institute, the company that the doctor founded.

That attempt didn't seem to make much of a difference, either - the movie grossed less than $15 million. One of the main problems with viral marketing is that the amount of people who get into it, seeking out all the websites actually finding it an enriching experience, is negligible. The other problem is that at first glance, by design, the average person would have no idea the website they stumbled across is actually part of a movie's advertising campaign.

Then again, viral marketing campaigns can prove useful. Knowing that there would be an eight-month hiatus between seasons two and three of television's Lost, ABC hired a team to create "The Lost Experience," which went beyond creating a few random websites - it was a full-fledged game. Go to TheHansoFoundation.org, find out more about one of the shadowy organizations from the show, receive a hint about another website you could go to, and so on, and so on. New websites popped up periodically, old ones radically changed, and the Lost fans involved in the Experience were treated to an enriched backstory for the TV show's dense mythology. For ABC, it meant retaining fans who might otherwise forget to tune in to the third season.

One of the original creators of Lost, J.J. Abrams, decided to use viral marketing again when he produced last January's Cloverfield. Disenfranchised with the way fans in this day and age increasingly knew everything about movies before they were released, Abrams wanted to bring back a sense of mystery to filmmaking. So he made sure the first trailer for the film didn't even include the title - just the release date, 1-18-08, and an accompanying website. A few other websites - so cryptic that there was speculation about whether or not they were even related to the film at all - sprang up. Excitement built. And thus a relatively simple monster movie was transformed into a sensation that scored a $40 million opening weekend.

For pure coolness factor, though, the best viral marketing campaign is one for a movie that hasn't even been released yet - The Dark Knight.

Basically, Warner Bros. pulled out all the stops. First there was IBelieveInHarveyDent.com, a website advertising the District Attorney candidate played by Aaron Eckhart. Then IBelieveInHarveyDentToo.com appeared - the same website, only "vandalized" by a criminal called the Joker.  (Go there, then hit Ctrl+A.)  A slew of websites followed - some run by citizens of Gotham City, or the Gotham police department - and some run by the Joker, encouraging his faithful "clowns" to go on missions for him.

What kind of missions? Well, that's where the internet and the real world collided in The Dark Knight's viral campaign, which is part of what made it the best-executed viral campaign yet. There weren't just viral websites for viral marketing's sake - follow them closely enough, and you were rewarded, with scavenger hunts held in major cities that any fan could embark on. At the end of the hunts were various prizes - most notably a chance to go in a theater and watch a new trailer for the film, or even, in one instance, the entire opening scene.

Of course, The Dark Knight is going to be huge anyway. The only viral marketing campaign that you could truly call a success story was Cloverfield's, because of the attention the secrecy brought to it - otherwise, these sorts of campaigns are impossible to quantify and haven't led to any other surprise hits. So why do they keep at it? Perhaps more than anything else, they're compelled to keep things creative - and in an idea-starved Hollywood, that's an encouraging thought.

Michael Dance
StrandedinManhattan.com

**Read more articles by Michael Dance**

Comments

[Kudzu Fire]

sounds it sounds cool, but...