It began as a summer tease.

A trailer beginning at a surprise party and ending in the midst of a rampage in New York City and the decapitation of the Statute of Liberty by an unidentified monster. Even with the scene shot through the lens of a consumer handheld camcorder, the film seemed epic.

In reality, this was an untitled, unfinished film to hit the box office with an unknown cast, a producer unproven on the silver screen and a budget too small to be considered a blockbuster.

With the first television trailers airing a month before its cinematic release on Jan. 18, monster movie ‘Cloverfield’ had garnered buzz without the use of conventional advertisements, instead relying on its shroud of mystery and online word-of-mouth, also known as viral marketing.

Opening today, its expectations are great, but in the wake of its marketing ploy, the film’s reputation seems to have preceded itself, fueled by imagination and speculation over unknown elements.

Almost a decade after the first use of viral marketing, ‘Cloverfield’ has adopted and expanded its execution, maximizing marketing’s effect with little time and minimal spending.

The rise of the Internet meant adaptation for the advertising world, venturing into untamed realms of social networking and blogs.

The Web 2.0

In the wake of a marketing revolution, the Internet was infected.

The increase in social networks and blogs gave birth to the virtual marketing phenomenon, identified as the Web 2.0 – an evolution of online communication.

‘The marketing power is no longer in the hands of the media anymore; it’s in the hands of the people… a truly democratic evolution,’ said Thierry Daher of Culture-buzz.com, a blog dedicated to viral campaigns and creative division of Vanksen Group USA.

Instead, it forces marketers to create influential concepts that will urge the viewer to pass it on, said Chief Executive Officer Daher.

Daher’s company seeds viral campaigns by distributing viral videos, games and Web sites to unpaid bloggers. Through word-of-mouth, Vanksen Group USA banks off the media attention that bloggers who post the ads generate from garnered buzz.

Aimed toward a youthful demographic, the target consumer for viral campaigns range from teenagers to young adults, said Karl Greenberg, author of the article ‘A Cautionary Tale For Viral Wannabes’ for Media Post Publications.

‘Consumers are fairly acclimated to buzz campaigns,’ Greenberg said. ‘And companies need to either camouflage their product or their advertising to make it look like something else.’

‘The Blair Witch Project’ is the benchmark for viral advertising for its realistic viral campaign, said Greenberg. ‘Their campaign was originally much better than the movie itself.’

An American independent horror film, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s ‘The Blair Witch Project’ was released in the summer of 1999 on a budget of $22,000. Using a viral online marketing campaign to suggest that the film was a real documentary, the movie – a fictional account of three teenage filmmakers venturing into haunted woods – went on to gross more than $248 million, profiting 11,000 times its original budget.

With a budget of approximately $25 million, ‘Lost’ producer J.J. Abrams’ ‘Cloverfield’ has garnered buzz through similar use of the Internet and viral campaigns, opting to stay away from conventional routes of advertisement through television, radio and print used by high budget films such as, ‘I Am Legend’ and ‘Transformers.’

‘Before the Internet, there really wasn’t viral marketing in the same way,’ said Ed Russell, an advertising professor at Syracuse. ‘Look at Google- it is an absolutely normal brand, never advertised at all. Everything was word-of-mouth, and people began saying, ‘I found the greatest search engine in the world.”

Similar online word-of-mouth campaigns have even appeared in political grassroots movements, where personal photos and information about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton can be found on MySpace, Friendster and Facebook, complete with links to her YouTube videos.

‘It’s like dropping red dye into a glass of water, like injecting a drug into an artery instead of into a muscle,’ said Greenberg. ‘It’s a portal.’

Recent studies have shown the decline in effectiveness of conventional advertisements due to their lack of credibility.

For consumers, 68 percent trust personal recommendations today, up from 23 percent who trusted other consumers in 2003, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.

An ad for the newest Gillette razor wouldn’t be as credible as a call from a friend saying, ‘I’ve been using the razor, and it’s really innovative and great,’ said Daher. ‘You would believe your friend a lot more than the ad.’

Marketing the buzz

The world of viral marketing is shameless.

The essence of viral marketing is its element of surprise, which is the primary factor in spawning the hype.

Viral tie-ins, enigmatic trailers and an expanded meta-story, a plot connected not only with ‘Cloverfield’ but also to viral Web sites were the surprises that convinced Andrea Streeter, an undecided freshman in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, that she had to see the movie.

‘You didn’t know what was going on,’ said Streeter, of the teaser. ‘I think I saw the very first trailer on the Internet. I just happened to come upon it, and it didn’t have a title for the movie. So I starting Googling and clicking, and I found a whole other world and a whole other back story.’

Still, excitement does not guarantee box-office success. ‘Snakes on a Plane’ acquired massive attention through the Web before its 2006 release, yet fell short of box-office expectations. The initial buzz about a potentially great film had dissolved into unfulfilled hype for audience members.

A good product backs a good viral campaign, Russell said.

The fate of ‘Cloverfield’ rests not only at the box office, but also in the approval of its viewers.

Despite its viral marketing performance, if the buzz flattens or if box office receipts don’t add up, the film could serve as a landmark in viral marketing failures.

‘Historically, (viral marketing) became important because people generally look at advertising very cynically, and generally, viral marketing was done in a very different way,’ Russell said. ‘But it’s no different in the end; it’s promoting a product like everybody else.’

Published on January 17, 2008 at 12:00 pm