Good article in this month's Fast Company on Campfire Media the team behind some great contemporary viral campaigns including Beta 7 for Sega and Art of The Heist for Audi. I like the way they embrace non-linearity in storytelling. Yet, as someone working in an agency it scares me that we are not prepared to build these types of campaigns ourselves. The first thing you have to do is understand the real behavior, language and actions of your audience, something we planners should be able to do:
To create that kind of bond, Campfire immerses itself in the unspoken etiquettes and motivations of different target communities--Internet anthropology with a commercial twist. Monello spent weeks before "Beta-7" loitering on gamer fan sites and message boards, learning the local language and culture. There he discovered, for example, that unfinished bootlegs of new games are highly prized among fans--so Campfire had Beta-7 send bootlegs to a few voices whom Monello had identified as leaders of the tribe. The seeds took: Those players uploaded screen shots to all the big gamer sites. "All of a sudden, this thing everyone thought was a marketing campaign bled into the real world," Monello remembers, "and that's when things started to get electric."
The second thing is to sweat the details and make more content that we are used to, more quickly:
So what's the trick? Obsession. Observation. Overkill. Creating a viral campaign isn't like filming a 30-second spot and then sitting back and letting it run. It's a marathon, one that takes mastery of numerous media and the creativity to spin out a form of open-ended, multilayered, living entertainment that will keep an audience engaged for as long as possible. On the Sega campaign, which Monello compares to "a three-month-long Saturday Night Live skit," the team began by writing months' worth of backlogged blog entries to give Beta-7 a history. When it decided to create the medical Web site, it researched how video games might affect the brain--and had an art director scribble the doctors' notes--so the documents would look legit. It even taped ambush video of the game's real programmers denying Beta-7's charges.
And this is where I feel we often let ourselves down. We like to craft one thing for months, rather than build lots of stuff that gives depth, nuance and complexity. It's a mindset and behavioral pattern we need to change if we are to produce interesting stuff for brands. The days of the self-contained gem are numbered.
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