2. Media Marketing Campaign
I have chosen to analyze the film, “The Blair Witch Project” and
it’s marketing campaign. It was released 22nd October 1999 and
falls under the genre of Horror. It was directed by Eduardo
Sánchez and Daniel Myrick and starred Heather Donahue,
Joshua Leonard and Michael. C. Williams; this project being
everyone’s first. The budget of this film was only $60,000, this
is reflective in the type of film that had been produced. The
Blair Witch Project is a found footage film and it uses this to
add an extra layer of realism and with it an extra layer of
horror. The age rating of the film was 15 for frequent strong
language and horror. The target audience for this film will have
been students as this is what age the actors are playing adding
a level of relation.
3. What is a Marketing Campaign?
Marketing campaigns promote products through different types of media, such as television, radio, print, and
online platforms. Campaigns are not solely reliant on advertising and can include demonstrations, video
conferencing, and other interactive techniques. Businesses operating in highly competitive markets
and franchises may initiate frequent marketing campaigns and devote significant resources to generating brand
awareness and sales. Marketing campaigns can be designed with different goals in mind, including building a
brand image, introducing a new product, increasing sales of a product already on the market, or even reducing
the impact of negative news. Defining a campaign's goal usually dictates how much marketing is needed and
what media are most effective for reaching a specific segment of the population.
4. The marketing campaign goal was to make this fictional film seem real to its
target audience. The Blair Witch Project is thought to be the first widely
released film marketed primarily by the Internet. Marketing for the movie
started 6 months before its Sundance screening on25th January 1999. The film's
official website featured faux police reports as well as "newsreel-style"
interviews. These augmented the film's found footage device to spark debates
across the Internet over whether the film was a real-life documentary or a work
of fiction. During screenings, the filmmakers made advertising efforts to
promulgate the events in the film as factual, including the distribution of flyers
at festivals such as Sundance, asking viewers to come forward with any
information about the "missing" students. The campaign tactic was that viewers
were being told, through missing person posters, that the characters were
missing while researching in the woods for the mythical Blair Witch. The IMDb
page also listed the actors as "missing, presumed dead" in the first year of the
film's availability. The film's website contains materials of actors posing as police
and investigators giving testimony about their casework, and shared childhood
photos of the actors to add a sense of realism.
Media Marketing Campaign
5. The Blair Witch Project’s marketing campaign was designed with the purpose of going viral, spreading knowledge of the film
by word of mouth. They banked on the idea that people would talk about the legend of the blair witch project using the web
to spread the message. 6 months prior to the Sundance premier directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick launched
a website, which sketched in the background details of their story: in October 1994, three film students went off to make a
documentary about a local legend concerning witches and a child-snatching hermit called Rustin Parr. The students failed to
return, and a subsequent police search unearthed only a few clues as to their whereabouts; the most significant find being a
buried duffle bag containing various audio tapes and videos. After Sanchez and Myrick sold the finished movie to distributor
Artisan Entertainment in 1999, the filmmakers continued to update the site with new snippets of information - interviews,
bogus news stories, images from the site where the students were said to have disappeared - with Artisan helping to
perpetuate the low-key campaign. The site served as a launch pad for a cunningly-woven web of misinformation. The website
was plugged on message boards, while entries on IMDb stated that the students behind the film were still missing.
6. Gradually, word of these disappearances and the resulting
footage spread, with speculation fanned further by the
production company’s refusal to advertise the film
conventionally. Typically films will promote their film
everywhere they can with different forms of media from
posters and billboards to adverts on the TV, however The Blair
Witch Project stayed away from this, relying on the internet
and word of mouth to spread the information about the film.
Rather than using major marketing footage was shown in
colleges. A documentary on the Sci-Fi Channel further blurred
the line between fiction and reality. Brief, low-fi teaser trailers
showed tantalizing snippets of footage - not least actress
Heather Donahue's terrorized face, an image which would soon
become famous. Last, and most importantly, the trailers
showed the address for the Blair Witch website.
7. In the 90s social media was just starting out, with very minimum sites
to be found. Any notable social media sites (Six Degrees from the late
90s) from then have died out now. Rather than create a social media
page for the blair witch project, marketers posted information into
different forums, discussing the legend. This way the story kept its
realism. If social media had of been as big then as it is now I still think
the marketers wouldn’t create social media to promote the film; at
least not in the conventional way. If an Instagram page would’ve been
created by marketers to push the story of the blair witch it seems less
realistic. A key part in the marketing campaign was realism, it was
based around the idea that the events which occur in the film really
did happen and the campaigns goal was to convince everyone that it
was true. The closest the marketing team came to creating a social
media was the creation of their website, which gained a greater social
presence than a lot of company's social media now gaining more than
20 million viewers before the film hit theatres which for 1999 is very
high.
(The Website)
8. Marketing Campaign Timeline
June 1998
The Blair
Witch website
was created
1999
Trailer was
released
January 1999
Movie featured
at Sundance
festival
January 1999
Missing person
posters handed
out for the actors
July 1999
Team make
website their main
platform,
spending around
$1,000,000 total
on promotion.
22nd October
1999
Film is released
July - October 1999
“Recovered footage” and
additional information about
the characters is continuously
added to the website
9. Conclusion
In my opinion the Blair Witch marketing campaign was very successful. With a budget of only $60,000 it
managed to gross $248 million worldwide. The website gained 20 million visitors before the film was even
released which is an insane number of people considering it all took place in 1999 before technology was as
advanced as it was now; nowadays its so easy for something to blow up and go viral, but at a time when social
media was barely even a thing word of the Blair Witch spread globally. The marketing campaign also fully
served its purpose by making the target audience believe in the myth; the website had people coming back
every week to try and gain more information on the legend of the Blair Witch.
