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• Learn how an alternate reality game for Halo 2 received 240,000 visitors on its debut
• Find out how The Big Word Project achieved worldwide publicity with almost zero cost
• Discover how The Blair Witch Project became the largest per-screen gross in motion-picture history
If you are a digital marketing agency searching for the top viral campaigns to emulate, you've found them. Read on and learn from these success stories.
1) I Love Bees
“I Love Bees” was an alternate reality game that was part of the viral campaign for the release of popular first-person shooter game, Halo 2.
Advertised by a subliminal message in Halo 2 trailer, players who logged onto the website discovered that the pages seemed to be hacked by a mysterious intelligence. This is part of the elaborate website design aimed to heighten the users' sense of curiosity and urge them to probe deeper into this complex website.
As players solved puzzles, they eventually discovered audio logs posted on the website that gradually revealed more of the fictional background story, involving an artificial intelligence left behind on planet Earth and its attempts at putting itself back together.
The reception that the campaign received was phenomenal. The website received over three million unique visitors over the course of three months. At least 250,000 fans logged onto the site on the day of its debut, and more than 500,000 returned to the site each day it was updated.
2) The Big Word Project
Not all viral campaigns are carried out by large production companies to gain commercial success. Two Masters students from Northern Ireland have developed a project aimed at exploring what different words mean to different people.
Anyone who visited their website are given the opportunity to buy a word from a list of over 170,000 at $1 a letter, and that word is then permanently linked to a URL of their choice. Although having a link on the site might not increase search engine optimisation for someone attempting to promote his website, it can still increase website traffic.
Although both students are web designers, the site was created with a simplistic web 2.0-style with few colours and no advertisements. There was virtually no cost involved in the making of this project.
Even so, The Big Word Project saw thousands of visitors in just the first week and had to add more than 2,000 words to the list to meet growing demands. The word count has passed 5,000 since its launch.
The website became popular purely due to word-of-mouth, primarily bloggers, spreading the word throughout the internet. All proceeds from the project have gone towards paying their tuition fees.
3) The Blair Witch Project
The technique of viral marketing was initially popularised by the successful marketing campaign for The Blair Witch Project, a tiny budget film, which set a record for the largest per-screen gross in motion-picture history.
Released in 1999, this low budget movie captures the story of three young student filmmakers who disappeared in the forest while filming a documentary about a local legend called the Blair Witch. The video was supposedly recovered a year later without any trace of the students or their bodies.
The film generated plenty of buzz online as the creators created a myth that they had found actual footage of an unexplainable phenomenon left by a missing group of campers. The creators themselves seeded this myth by appearing on a television show with 8 minutes of footage they claimed was found in the woods. When The Blair Witch Project website went live, they further spread this disinformation.
Since the World Wide Web was still developing during that time, the average internet audience was less used to subtle marketing strategies. With the attention of conventional media adding in to the hype, the result was a profit of around $300million, in front of a total cost of less than $3million.
Although all of these viral campaigns are different, they were still invested in internet search marketing and came out tops during their respective heyday. That should be the goal of every viral campaign.
• Learn how BBC shed its conservative image to attract more than 100,000 viewers to its iPlayer homepage
• Check out how Cloverfield grossed more than $16mill on its opening day due to smart marketing planning
• Find out how Thresher turned an accidental leak into huge profits
If you're an online marketing firm researching on the world's top viral campaigns to learn from, you've found them. Read on and learn from these success stories.
BBC's iPlayer
Sometimes, you may choose to ignore utilising search engine optimisation and simply put up a creative video online to promote your product. After all, creativity is vital for the success of any campaign, and BBC certainly incorporated maximum creativity in its 2008 marketing campaign promoting its iPlayer service.
Released appropriately in conjunction with April Fool's Day, this 90-second video showed a colony of Adelie Penguins “flying” across the Antarctica to the Amazon Rainforest. Penguins are, of course, famous for being flightless birds.
Although it was shot in the serious documentary-style that is typical of BBC, the appearance of ‘Monty Python' star Terry Jones and flying penguins are enough to show the viewers that this video was faked. Even so, more than 100,000 viewers logged onto iPlayer's homepage on April Fool's Day to see this rare and playful side of BBC.
Besides being on iPlayer's homepage, immense popularity has also resulted in this video being widely uploaded on mainstream video sharing websites and social networking communities, particularly those dedicated to wildlife enthusiasts.
Cloverfield
The viral marketing campaign for 2008 American monster movie, Cloverfield, produced by Emmy and Golden Globe-winner J.J. Abrams, started with a teaser that showed the release date of the film January 18, 2008 without the title. With this untitled trailer fuelling media speculation and the film being shot in cinéma vérité style, this viral campaign already bore the hallmarks of The Blair Witch Project marketing strategy, minus the lies of course.
But instead of just creating buzz over the film, this marketing campaign also cashed in on the drink Slusho!, which was already made famous by the producer's previous series, Alias. Together with the creation of an investigative-style website design that allows viewers to piece the time-coded photos together to figure out the plot of the film, many movie fans were intrigued by the innuendos of the film.
Although the film was released in January, which was often considered as the month for airing bad Hollywood films, it grossed a total of $16,930,000 on its opening day in the United States and Canada, before going on to gross a total of $40,058,229 on its opening weekend. Their untitled teaser, innovative website and viral tie-ins have made the film the most successful January release to date.
Thresher's discount voucher
Not all successful viral campaigns are born out of careful planning and precise execution. Thresher's gaffe during the 2006 Christmas season is surely one of the most successful accidental viral marketing campaigns to date.
Thresher, an international alcohol retailing company, distributed a discount voucher promising 40 per cent off all wine and champagne at any of its branches as a form of “thank you” to their suppliers. However, a website designer of Stormhoek, a South African supplier, uploaded the discount voucher on the company blog as a free download and it spread via email like wildfire.
Instead of refusing to honour the discount voucher however, Thresher chose to continue serving their customers to avoid upsetting them, which can lead to damaging the company's reputation.
The reaction from the public was astounding. Without spending a cent for this marketing plan, Thresher's official website was crushed by a stampede of consumers rushing to find out the nearest Thresher branch. In the end, Thresher made a huge profit, even though actual figures were not disclosed. Thresher basically received more publicity during that holiday season than they ever had for that entire year.
Even though Thresher got lucky by their fortuitous blunder, every online marketing agency has to realise that only proper planning and perfect execution can guarantee success.