Viral Marketing

There are many different ways of viral marketing. The aim of them is to get people talking.

Saw 5

Lionsgate decided to put effort into making a good viral campaign film Saw 5. On the official website people were able to enter a friends name and phone number, as well as their name. The friend would then get a phone call from Jigsaw saying:

"Hello, [Friends name]. Do you want to play a game? You think it's over, but the games has just begun. I'm here with your friend, [Your name]. My work will continue in a way that you never saw coming. You won't believe how it ends."

However, this was soon shut down by the police as people that were unaware of the Saw franchise, began ringing the police. Claiming that their friend had been kidnapped or was going to be killed.

The Last Exorcism

For the film, The Last Exorcism, Lionsgate once again did a viral campaign. At the time of the release 'Chatroulette', a website that allows you to talk to randomly allocated strangers, was a big hit. In order to take advantage of this sudden craze, Lionsgate developed a video which depicted a young woman starting to get undressed, her eyes then roll to the back of her head and screams are heard. After scaring a few people, the website address shows up.

The Blair Witch Project

The Blair Witch Project had a few different attempts at viral marketing. One was to have 'found footage'. Another was using 'Missing Persons' posters. This shows three of the characters from the film and claims that they went missing while they were filming a short documentary on a local legend, this being the Blair Witch.


For our film, we could use missing posters similarly to The Blair Witch Project. In this we could have a poster for each character that is murdered, these being Alex, Becky and Charlie. This would be posted on our blog an on some social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, with a link attached to the poster. This would allow us to get the word out about our film.