Research into Viral Marketing for Films

Some of the most effective uses of marketing a film is making it go viral- viral meaning that it becomes popular on the internet. For me, the most effective ways of marketing a film is making the film give the impression that it is reality. Many films have done this before with strong impressions on audiences. Here are a few examples:

The Blair Witch Project = This film claimed itself to be a documentary- an actual piece of footage that was supposed to provide evidence for supernatural activity.

The campaign for the film was crafted around attempting to make it appear as though the events of the film were not fictional but a true account of a documentary shoot gone wrong. With a website purporting to show police reports and real evidence related to the case, buzz for the film reached previously unseen levels for a low-budget horror flick made for less than a million dollars.

Of course, that’s not to say that everyone believed The Blair Witch Project was depicting real events, but if you ask anyone who followed the film at the time of release, they’ll tell you that the vast majority of moviegoers were unconvinced as to whether the film was fiction or nonfiction. And for a film with a production budget estimated to have been about $60,000, the viral marketing certainly paid huge dividends, with a $140 million domestic gross and a $108 million overseas gross for a worldwide total of $248 million.

The Dark Knight = Christopher Nolan's Batman epic marketed its film in many ways such as trailers, posters and utilising social media accounts to attract internet focused audiences. However, Warner Bros. too attempted to make the film a reality by creating a legitimate-looking campaign site for Harvey Dent. Besides introducing the motto “I believe in Harvey Dent” and giving fans early access to themes explored in the film, the Joker would later take to the same sites, defacing them and making his presence felt. Soon after, emails sent to the vandalized website would remove the pixels blocking an image and revealing to fans the first official image of the Joker.

Warner Bros. would again use viral marketing to push the film, as it sent fans on a scavenger hunt at Comic-Con that would unlock a teaser trailer and a new photo of the Joker.

 Cloverfield = The 2008 sci-fi monster film Cloverfield was equally successful in marketing their film. For this film, a series of websites were created that focused on the fictional drink Slusho! and the fictional Japanese company Tagruato. As speculation mounted as to what these companies meant for the film itself, a number of websites were also created that contained puzzles, including one that provided a number that when texted from a mobile phone, provided a ringtone of the unrevealed monster and a wallpaper of a destroyed Manhattan.

Secrecy was also an important factor in Cloverfield’s marketing strategy, as images and the first trailer revealed the desolation of Manhattan by a large creature but with no clear indication as to what the creature would look like. This lead to widespread Internet speculation that the film was anything from a live-action adaption of Voltron to a new adaption of Godzilla or even a spinoff of Lost.

The risky campaign ultimately paid off, as the film earned $40.1 million in its opening weekend while going on to earn $170 million worldwide on a budget of only $25 million.

Link to Slusho website: http://slusho.jp/

My Viral Marketing Advert Idea

For our film, Virago, I too wanted to create a perception of reality. However, because out film does not have any fictional brands or companies, I used the idea behind The Blair Witch Project's marketing campaign and created a fake news story, describing to death of our film's main protagonist in the real newspaper Barnsley Chronicle. I believe that this would be successful because it will provide the audience with a sense of mystery (Barthe's Enigma Codes) and will encourage them to watch the film and wonder why the main character, Edward Virago, dies.