Viral and Internet Marketing
I recently just saw the trailer for Super 8, the new J.J. Abrams movie that will be coming out next summer. This movie was filmed in great secrecy and now it has started its viral/internet marketing campaign. Apparently in the trailer there was a secret message which, in my opinion, was very hard to see anyway. This message will lead you to the website www.scariestthingieversaw.com which had just recently given its first clue tonight. It leads to another site www.rocketpoppeteers.com which is currently down but will obviously lead to either another web site or another clue. The whole purpose of these websites is to create some internet buzz about the movie and also give fans clues into what the movie is about (since the trailer itself does not give you much of anything)
What is good about this type of marketing? Well, the people who are already interested in going to see the movie are going to be working for you. They'll be telling their friends about the movie and then they will be telling their friends and so on. Even websites about figuring out the viral marketing (www.super8news.com) pop up and they do all the revealing for you. Even me talking about super 8 in this post is helping their marketing campaign. It becomes a kind of perpetual motion machine, not stopping, not losing any momentum until the movie finally comes out. It is a pretty inexpensive way to advertise your movie.
However, the whole viral marketing idea is making the assumption that your target audience is actively searching to discover things about the movie itself. There are plenty of people out there who haven't even heard of Super 8 yet. I'm sure some haven't even heard of J.J. Abrams. Also, some people are just to lazy or don't even care to look into movies that they've heard about. This is why trailers on T.V. and on other internet sites are so crucial to the whole marketing campaign of a movie. It exposes those lazy and uncaring people.
Just the whole idea about using the internet to market a movie is still relatively new. Only a little over 10 years has the internet been used actively by the world. Sure...we had the internet in the 90s but come on, it was in the time of AOL where we just used it for e-mail and chat rooms. But just by looking at my example you can see how sophisticated and smart some of these campaigns are. It's kind of the American way of showing that we are still have smart people in this country. Of course we have to find that out through the medium of entertainment.
I guess the whole point of this post is that I love it. I think it is a great way to market something and it's fun for your target audience. All I can say is just don't do it like aqua teen hunger force did and have the city of Boston think your planting bombs all over the city.
What is good about this type of marketing? Well, the people who are already interested in going to see the movie are going to be working for you. They'll be telling their friends about the movie and then they will be telling their friends and so on. Even websites about figuring out the viral marketing (www.super8news.com) pop up and they do all the revealing for you. Even me talking about super 8 in this post is helping their marketing campaign. It becomes a kind of perpetual motion machine, not stopping, not losing any momentum until the movie finally comes out. It is a pretty inexpensive way to advertise your movie.
However, the whole viral marketing idea is making the assumption that your target audience is actively searching to discover things about the movie itself. There are plenty of people out there who haven't even heard of Super 8 yet. I'm sure some haven't even heard of J.J. Abrams. Also, some people are just to lazy or don't even care to look into movies that they've heard about. This is why trailers on T.V. and on other internet sites are so crucial to the whole marketing campaign of a movie. It exposes those lazy and uncaring people.
Just the whole idea about using the internet to market a movie is still relatively new. Only a little over 10 years has the internet been used actively by the world. Sure...we had the internet in the 90s but come on, it was in the time of AOL where we just used it for e-mail and chat rooms. But just by looking at my example you can see how sophisticated and smart some of these campaigns are. It's kind of the American way of showing that we are still have smart people in this country. Of course we have to find that out through the medium of entertainment.
I guess the whole point of this post is that I love it. I think it is a great way to market something and it's fun for your target audience. All I can say is just don't do it like aqua teen hunger force did and have the city of Boston think your planting bombs all over the city.