Viral Marketing

A lot of people, especially our age, spend a lot of time on social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Therefore viral marketing would be a good idea to help in promoting our film.

One of the films that did this and in doing so achieved considerable awareness was The Dark Night. They began their viral marketing process by utilizing the film’s tagline “why So Serious?” and also launching an official website featuring the fictional political campaign of Harvey Dent, with the caption “I Believe in Harvey Dent”. The site was expected to interest fans and have them participate in online puzzles and games. One of these included fans to send e-mails and as they did pixels would be slowly removed, revealing the first official image of the joker; it was ultimately replaced with many “HaHas” and hidden messages that said “see you in December”

Including puzzles and games within our website could be a possibility as I like the way that fans can get involved and be excited to see what’s going to happen or what they are going to see next. But at this stage we wanted to focus more on Facebook pages ECT and hopefully these pages will, in time, advertise our website.

Another film that tackled viral marketing was Cloverfield.

They began by making each character create a MySpace page advertising the film. The main attraction on these pages was the teaser trailer. But the name of the film was not featured in this. Fans become aware of this and the unnamed film began to be discussed all over the internet; on blog’s and many more networking pages. This led to more fans. After this a website was released and puzzles and games were featured the same as The Dark Night.

I think the way that Cloverfield built up their fans and then released a website was effective. Hopefully when marketing our film we can follow in similar footsteps as it seems to work.

Viral marketing obviously can play a big part in making different audiences aware of new films. The internet attacks so many different demographic groups allowing maximum awareness.

Viral marketing is definitely something we will be doing.