2. What is viral advertising?
■ Viral advertising is a marketing technique that uses pre-existing social networking
services and other technologies to produce and increase brand awareness or to
achieve other marketing objectives for films and other media products.
■ It uses the internet and social media sites like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and
Twitter. It is often free to use and makes it easier for independent film companies to
advertise the films whereas large conglomerates like Disney can afford to spend large
amounts on marketing, however they also use viral marketing as it is a large platform
that billions of people use.
3. Examples of viral advertising:
The Dark Knight Rises
■ The Dark Knight Rises, spread a viral campaign on twitter. It enticed the audience in,
and got them involved.
■ The fans had to find chalk bats that had been spread across the world and upload
them to twitter using the #TDKR07202012.
■ Each bat released a 1 second clip from the trailer. Once all bats were found the full
teaser trailer was released.
■ It took a total of 24 hours to release the full trailer.
■ This got the audience excited for the new film an raised awareness of the new film.
Many fans got involved all across the globe.
4. Examples of viral advertising:
The Amazing Spider-Man
■ The first Amazing Spider-Man had a pretty active viral campaign, revolving around a
website at markofthespider-man.com and a fake Oscorp website. (Read a detailed
archive of the film's viral marketing here.) Among other things, these sites revealed
more about Oscorp's "animal mutagen" experiments and just why and howCurt
Connors was becoming the Lizard.
■ But the movie's sequel seems to be doing way, way more world-building.The Daily
Bugle'sTumblr is running a series of newspaper stories hinting at the origins of almost
every villain in the Spider-Man universe, including some who will only pop up in the
sequels and spin-offs.ThisTumblr also shares plenty of insight into the workings of
OsCorp, which plays an even larger role than it did in the original Spider-Man trilogy.
