Anatomy of a succesful viral campaign

If your grew up reading comic books and love mis-understood, dark super hero, then you probably love the Dark Knight series. For those of you not "in the know" it's all about Batman, but not the Batman you see in the campy series from the 60's. This Batman is all about justice and protecting the innocent but he lives in the real world. This year they are releasing The Dark Night with a particularly well done viral campaign. Here's how the campaign was executed as well as key components of the campaign:

The enthusiast who wants to see this movie will go to great lengths to get the latest information. Having enthusiast is the first crucial ingredient to any viral campaign. The Dark Knight campaign started in May of 2007 with a website that featured a campaign for Harvey Dent (a DA in the movie who will have a serious split personality disorder).Not long afterward, another site was available, I believe in Harvey Dent too. When you go to this site, visitors were prompted for their email address. If they gave their email address, they were given a code that when entered on the site, removed a pixel from the poster. When all the pixels were removed, the first face of the new Joker (a villain in the movie was revealed).

Here's a key tactic in a viral campaign, enthusiast participation. What's interesting about this campaign is that the level of participation increases with each new tactic. (read on)

During the 2007 Comicon convention, a new website Whysoserious.com was revealed for the movie. I can't think of a better place to find enthusiast than a comic book convention. On this site, a scavenger hunt began directing fans to go to places throughout the country and find clues that would reveal another image of the Joker from the movie. In order to reveal the photo, everyone would have to work together to solve the clues. Another key tactic, enthusiast community building.

This was followed by yet another scavenger hunt in and around the time of Halloween where people could see yet another picture of the film, also encouraging them to submit pictures of themselves near land marks in their cities with face paint like the Joker. Of course, this is where the campaign might appear to be losing steam but hold on. Fans who did this were sent copies of a fictional newspaper, The Gotham Times, which led to the discovery of a number of other websites. Yet another key tactic, the element of mystery, discovery and surprise.

One of these sites had a game that, when played, revealed a card with a number of address in the United States and instructions to go to that address, say they were Robin Banks (get it? Robbing Banks?) and that they would get something there. Each of these places were bakeries. When people showed up, they were given a cake with a telephone number written in frosting.

Inside the cake was a cellphone contained in a Gotham evidence bag and a note that told them to call the number on the cake immediately. When the number was called, a recorded message was left, "Good work, clown! Keep this phone charged and with you at all times. Don't call me. I will call you … eventually." And another key tactic, exclusivity. Very few people have the phones but you can bet that as soon as the Joker calls his new "army", it will be all over blogs, message boards, etc.

These types of campaigns are very difficult to pull off. Experts like people at 42 Entertainment have the experience and know how. For every successful campaign like this one there are probably 10 other campaigns that fell on their face. As far as viral campaigns past and present, this one takes the cake. - Paul Herring

Comments

[Abbas Saleem Khan]

excellent piece on viral campaigns. fanboy suckers such as myself went ape over this thing. i remember the bees campaign for the halo games and although i dont really like halo i fell for it myself.

what im trying to experiment with is real life games and viral campaigns and mass crowd interaction - that would be extremely cool :)

[Mack Collier]

But with that fan devotion comes potential consequences. During the viral campaign for Nine Inch Nails last album (also spearheaded by 42), as all the websites were popping up, one fan created one that looked similar to the others, but when fans figured out it wasn't part of the campaign (or more importantly, the unfolding backstory), he received death threats, and had to quickly take it down.

[Cam Beck]

Yikes!

[Paul Herring]

There is no such thing as "making it go viral". Things can go badly and often do.

It's really fun, though, when they do work. Entertaining for the marketer and audience alike.