The document discusses viral marketing campaigns used by movie studios to promote upcoming films through social networking sites. It provides examples of successful viral campaigns for The Dark Knight and The Blair Witch Project that helped generate hype and positive word of mouth leading to commercial success. The Dark Knight campaign featured a fictional election for a character and emails from a fake election website that was later defaced to build anticipation for the Joker character. The Blair Witch Project is credited with starting the trend of using viral marketing techniques online.

1. Viral Marketing Campaign

2. What is a Viral Marketing Campaign? The word ‘Viral’ from Viral Marketing is derived from Virus because the point is that it spreads quickly. These campaigns are used by movie studios to promote upcoming films. The advertising campaigns are primarily targeted at people who frequently use the internet and Social Networking Sites. Social Networking Sites such as Myspace and Facebook are used to advertise these films. Often films that have used these techniques have gone on to be enormous success’s due to the hype and ‘word of mouth’ generated from these sites. Websites are often set up in these campaigns that act as if the films events are happening in the real world. Primary examples of this would be The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and The Dark Knight. This method is becoming more and more popular due to success of it and is being used more often in upcoming films. The most recent use of Viral Marketing is the film ‘District 9’ to be released later this year.

3. Primary examples of Viral Marketing Campaigns

4. The Dark Knight Viral Marketing Campaign The Dark Knight which was released in 2008 received critical acclaim and phenomenal success. Leading up to its release a Viral Marketing Campaign was used which proved successful in creating hype from word off mouth. One of the main drives of the campaign was Heath Ledgers Joker character. The fictional character was treated as a real life person. A fictional election was used for the character of Harvey Dent (see picture to left) that was treated as if it was real. People that visited the website could vote and received emails from the election website. Leading up to Heath Ledgers Oscar winning performance the Joker character appeared to deface the website and sabotage the campaign as a way of building hype for characters appearance as the central villain in the film. Joker defaced campaign

5. The Blair Witch Project Viral Marketing Campaign The Blair Witch Project released in 1999 is known as the film that started the trend of Viral Marketing.