Hello! My name is Eden Mayle and I’m a junior communications major. I was originally an animal science major until I quickly realized I like to play with animals rather than study them. I’m from a suburb outside of Houston, Texas, and yes, believe what you’ve heard - everything is bigger. In my spare time I’m in a sketch comedy group (the Skits-o-phrenics, come laugh with us!), and follow all things pop culture, except music, which I’m generally pretty pretentious about. My constant submersion in television, movies, Perez Hilton, and other things that rot my brain has recently gotten me interested in the Internet-utilizing advertising technique known as viral marketing.
Viral marketing began to infect my life when I saw a movie trailer before Transformers this summer. The trailer was a great teaser to a new monster movie, but ended abruptly, revealing only the release date, 1-18-08, and producer J.J. Abrams (known for scary smoke monsters on Lost and scary haircuts on Felicity). No title, no actors, not even a catchy monster name like Godzilla. I was hooked.
When I got home, the nerd in me took over. Well, let’s be honest, I was seeing Transformers, so the nerd was pretty much already in control. I googled the movie on the few details that I knew, and apparently I wasn’t the only one interested in Abrams’ new project. There were a ton of websites about the film – blogs on monster theories, youtube videos of people spying on the film set, discussion boards on possible plots, anything and everything you could ever want to know about this 90-second trailer. I stumbled upon one website with a posted video that deconstructed the trailer essentially frame-by-frame, even going so far as to attempt to determine the party’s exact location within New York City. As I was watching, I couldn’t help but think, Why was this made? What possessed this person to put in this much effort? And inevitably, Why am I watching this?
This is viral marketing. Products relying on its audience to voluntarily spread its message through accessible networks, and what better network than the Internet? This movie has generated more buzz without any conventional advertising than most films ever dream to. I suppose what viral marketing makes me wonder most is, Is this the new marketing frontier? What makes this work? Would this kind of campaign have been as successful if J.J. Abrams hadn’t been attached? And finally, am I (Eden Mayle, a free, young, independent thinker) just a pawn to the advertisers of this film? After all, I just spent a long time spreading the word on a blog about some movie that’s depending on me spreading the word.
Viral marketing depends on an infiltration of almost all of Wallace’s Internet environments, including asynchronous discussion forums, e-Mail, synchronous chats, and interactive videos. It’s worked pretty well for this movie, but can it for others?
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Hey, Eden. Congrats on a really nice post. I enjoyed reading it, especially because I had pretty much the exact same reaction to the trailer for the J.J. Abrams movie. I think your future posts could benefit from you providing more of your thoughts on an issue than just posing questions, but here are some thoughts of my own.
One possible explanation for the phenomenon of viral marketing is the idea that we humans love to be part of something. By helping to promote such a mysterious movie like the Abrams, we feel like we’re part of the mystery. It could also be just a natural result of the internet moving towards more and more public-edited content such as Wikipedia and Youtube that advertising is only the next logical domain for user contribution. Great post, and I look forward to reading more.
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