Viral Advertising

Viral Advertising

What is viral advertising?
It is a direct marketing technique where a company uses technology like social networks, mobiles, emails, Youtube, etc to generate word of mouth publicity in the hope of creating a fad or craze. The whole purpose of film company's using viral advertising is to help increase the interest for their films, helping increase the sales.

Different types of viral advertising:

The Dark Knight - launched In 2007, Warner Brothers used a viral advertising for the new batman film, The Dark Knight. They set up a fake newspaper called 'The Gotham Times' and a website whysoserious.com 

Toy Story 3 - They launched a unique viral video campaign with fake, vintage '80s commercials for the toy Lots o' Huggin Bear, (a character in the film) Internet-only videos like one with Woody and Buzz on an IM chat and hilarious 70s-themed interviews with the Ken doll called 'Groovin' With Ken' as well as his advice series 'Ken's Dating Tips.' All of this excess creative content, as well as a Facebook applications that allowed fans to purchase advance tickets through the site and update their friends when doing so increased interest for the film.

 

 

 

The Blair Witch Project - Before YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, 'The Blair Witch Project' set the standard for guerilla marketing done virally. The film gave the impression this was real, actual "found footage." The filmmakers and Artisan Entertainment supported that by building a website that backed this claim; they also circulated the rumours via online message boards. The film terrified audiences all the more when, in the back of their heads, they thought it might just be real.

Carrie (2013) - The new Carrie film, generated interest using Youtube with a video titled 'Telekinetic Coffee Shop Surprise' with the hashtag #FlexlikeCarrie. It shows a Carrie based prank in a New York coffee shop where a female character uses her "telekinetic" powers, like Carrie White's in the Stephen King novel allowing her to throw a man up against the wall, knock over tables and throw books off a shelf. 

The first day the prank was uploaded on 7th October, it had more than 2 million hits, boosting the Carrie movie. The films stars, Julianne Moore and Chloe Grace Moretz used their popularity and took to Twitter to share the viral prank to millions of their followers.