The Use of Viral Marketing for our film

For further marketing for our film, and to build up the hype, we would want to exploit the internet and use viral marketing techniques to advertise our film. In the past, viral marketing has proved very successful for other films and has allowed them to make a lot of money and people have become transfixed by their marketing techniques. One good example is ‘Cloverfield’ (Dir. Matt Reeves, 2008). To advertise this film, a teaser trailer was released over a year before the films release date. The trailer also did not give the name of the film, just a website that people could visit. Over time, as the release date drew closer, each of the films characters developed back stories and were given Facebook pages that were regularly updated up until the film opened in cinemas. Also, pretend companies that were to be used in the film were given web pages, to make them seem real. A whole Cloverfield world was created, to make the film seem more real and draw people in. It worked, and the film was a success at the box office.

Another example of successful viral marketing was ‘The Dark Knight’ (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2008). Like ‘Cloverfield’, a whole world revolving around the film was created. But, along with that a treasure trail was made, and fans had to follow clues around the web and also around the USA to get their first glimpse of The Joker among other things. Almost a hundred websites were also created to make Gotham seem like a real city, and bit-by-bit they were ‘Joker-ised’ to create hype about the famous villain.

We agreed that viral marketing would be a great strategy to use to market our film, as we thought it would build hype and we would be able to give away the name, posters and trailers bit by bit, allowing people to become excited and intrigued about the new film. We would want to be as secretive as possible, so that no major plot points would be given away and that people would go and see it to find out why this film was so secretive.

Techniques like dark, gloomy advertising at the top of websites would intrigue people. We would want something to catch people’s eye and make them wonder what the advertisement was about. Maybe we wouldn’t put the title of the film and just a tagline of some sort, so they would click the link to find out the title and other information. The trailers that would be released would barely have any footage from the actual film, just specific sounds or voiceovers. We hope that this would make the viewer feel tense, yet wonder what this advertisement was about. A website or social networking page would maybe be displayed at the end, not the film’s title. This would allow people to log onto these sites and find out more, thereby increasing the interest in our film.

We would want to create as much interest as possible for our film, without giving away any of the plot and barely any footage. We agree that this technique would make all types of cinema-goers interested, not just the ones that only enjoy thriller films. Overall, we think that this would create much interest and allow our film to succeed at the box office.

- Taylor Gladwin