Ideas for a viral ad

Viral advertising often takes little time, minimum budgets and maximum effect. It relies on people seeing the viral advertisement and sharing it with other people and then for those people to also watch it and share it with more people, creating an extensive network of viewers.

One of my ideas for a viral ad is similar to the successful viral advertising campaign for The Blair Witch project. Because our film contains a lot of hand held footage, this footage can be put online making out it is real found footage. The blair witch project is considered by some people to be the best viral marketing campaign of all time. They put together a basic website featuring 'found' footage, this website expanded to reflect new information being discovered about the 'story'. They also joined online forums adding mysterious bits of information in order to keep people talking. So as well as creating a website for our film we could also expand on it by other viral advertising ideas, for example we could create posters for a missing pendant with a very high reward if it's found. This is because the pendant is seen in the footage which will be put online, and in the film the pendant links the murders, it is a symbol of death as the murderer passes along the pendant to the next victims. Creating the poster for the missing pendant will give it more significance and people who have seen the footage may realise that the pendant worn in it is the same as the missing one in the posters.

The Blair Witch Project received over $248 million at the box office, this was the second highest return on investment of any film. The viral marketing campaign was set up before sites such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter existed and before mainstream use of the internet showing that it's success was even more incredible. Therefore, creating a good viral marketing campaign can prove vital in generating huge publicity and interest.