Friday, March 21, 2008

Case 1017

So today I was sent a link to the Case 1017 video and found the original on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxzrPHaWda8 and started investigating the guy that posted it, and discovered this is actually an interesting viral campaign when you start to dig… and it has 1,121,159 views and counting since being posted on 3/15/08…

I think the video is a bit too produced, just making the quality poor with a filter doesn’t work. They seem to obviously be pointing the camera at everything at the right time and when will people learn a shaky camera doesn’t make things look viral? I also look at it and wonder how anyone would really even care about it, or stop to figure out what its for. Yet they know it’s probably fake since if it was a real story, it would have been on the news.… which could blow the whole campaign if someone actually sends it to a major news station only to find out the whole thing is a hoax.

But something of interest is the guy who posted it on YouTube. He has a video blog with currently 15 video blog posts, dating back to march 4. They certainly did a lot of back-story for this. http://youtube.com/profile_videos?user=EricsVideoBlog&p=r

Also of interest is this blog http://lastpalmtree.blogspot.com/ that is also hosting the viral video. Although it started back in December supposedly, there are no comments on any of those posts. This means one of two things…

One, no one was reading the blog. Or two (and more likely) you can’t backdate comments like you can blog entries on blogger.

Actually a little further investigation into the blog and I noticed that he boasts a Flicker account, which happens to be hosting his blog photos. All flickr photos are dated 2/19 and later and his header image is pulling from Flickr, so either his blog had no header image when It started, or the real blog was started on 2/19

Even the online buzz is feeling a little skewed, people feel its either a Cloverfield Sequel, a re-make of [REC}, or just some film being a "copy-cat" of the Cloverfield style of viral marketing.

Here is a cool forum where people are picking this apart daily…

http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24784&start=15

So after watching this campaign unfold and numerous others and my experience with entertainment marketing here a few guidelines I feel that these types of campaigns need to follow.

1. Believability – production value needs to match the abilities of the story you are trying to tell. For example, if it was established that this was news crew shooting the video, which would be more believable, then the quality would be better, most DV Cams today have good resolution, plus if its DV, copying the tape over and over again wouldn’t really have an effect on quality.

2. Do it in real time. If you are posting in December you really need to post in December. For 1017 they were smart and at least joined blogger in December. but the lack of comments seems suspicious.

3. The original viral clip needs to be carefully seeded - A quick Google search reveals this everywhere. and looks like it was uploaded in mass, a sign of an agency in my opinion.

4. All the components need to be in place - once the viral video breaks out, the users will start figuring out the puzzle, and to them its a giant treasure hunt on the the internet.

5. Viral campaign /ARG followers are smart and like a challenge don’t make it too obvious (it seems a bit forced that retired policeman just started a blog and is posting the video on it)

6. don’t force feed the online viewers to interact, line like this “where the hell is this, and what the hell is going on? make a video response and tell me what you think” seem forced as well, especially the call to make a video response part.

7. Media Interaction – Fine line of the news media getting involved and blowing the story if you pretend its real. I think for that reason you need to position the campaign as a campaign about the film (like Cloverfield succeeded in doing) as opposed to pretending this is a real event that happened 5 days ago.

8. People are ok with playing the game but it needs to come off as a game. People don't like to be tricked and pretending this is real, is already causing people to create video blog posts that denounce it as marketing.

9. Seed online forums with links to the video - again this needs to be done carefully as too many posts or obvious language can be seen as fake.

It will be interesting to see where this goes, the speculation is its for a move called "Quarantine" slated for a 10/17/2008 release... Hopefully it will be a smart well executed campaign but time will tell.

Rating: 6 - as of 3/21/08

No comments: