“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”
Thomas Paine
Are you able to lay your hands on a spare £10k? If so, then you’ve the budget to make a blockbuster movie – and that includes marketing! Selling out in cinemas across America, Paranormal Activity has been described variously as the ‘new Blair Witch Project’ and ‘the scariest movie of all time’.
So scary is this film, it is said, that punters have been walking out rather than endure it through to the end. Those who remain emerge from cinemas ‘shell shocked’ while ‘breathing a collective sigh of relief’.
The fact that Paranormal Activity cost just £10,000 to make is remarkable in itself. But what is even more impressive is the marketing campaign that propelled an unknown film from a little-known director into a box-office phenomenon.
Paramount Studios purchased the film from director Oron Peli after spotting its potential at the Slamdance Film Festival. But rather than marketing the film in the conventional way, the studio opted for a ‘soft’ launch and released it into just a dozen cinemas. The aim was to give the film an ‘aura of ‘exclusivity’. Sure enough, people were soon talking about it on Twitter. A trailer interspersing clips of the film with footage of screaming audiences was posted on YouTube, while a dedicated Paranormal Activity website invited visitors to petition cinemas to show the film in their local town. 250,000 people duly obliged. The momentum became unstoppable. The rest is history. Is the film as scary as they claim? Judge for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_UxLEqd074
Personally, I’ve found bigger scares lurking in the back of my fridge, but perhaps I’m just an old cynic.
But, film aside, there’s a lesson to be learned here. Because as well as providing an object lesson in creative low-budget marketing, Paranormal Activity gives us a valuable insight into the best way to tap into the power of twitter. Rather than tweeting independently, the real art of using
Twitter as a marketing (or propaganda) tool is to manipulate the twitterati to tweet on your behalf. You aren’t reliant on your own Twitter network; you’re tapping into other people’s networks and allowing them to do the work for you.
OK, it may be easy to set people tweeting about a sexy product like an art-house horror movie. But what if you’re trying to get people excited about a relatively run of the mill product or event?
On these occasions we resort to our old friend the PR charity stunt!
I have an advertising client who decided to raise money for charity. While a worthy pursuit, charity fundraising in itself is hardly going to set people talking. It’s too commonplace. It has no news value.
To counter such apathy, my client organised a sponsored abseil event which involved his entire staff abseiling from the roof of their high-rise London offices (or at least those staff who were willing and able).In no time at all a small crowd had gathered in the street below to watch the spectacle. People began tweeting; in a matter of minutes a news crew had turned up to record the event. The crowd expanded. Voila! A shed load of free publicity!
You don’t have to be a cool London ad agency with a big contingent of staff to pull off a successful PR charity stunt. It can work equally well on a micro-level. My local pub, for example, organises an annual charity raft race on the River Ouse. A prize is awarded to the first home-made raft to sail by any means down the river to nearby Newhaven. The event inevitably pulls a big crowd (not least because ‘tradition’ dictates that spectators pelt the hapless occupants of the twenty or so ramshackle rafts with flower bombs and eggs!) and brings in much business and publicity for the pub – as well as a welcome boost of funds for the chosen charity. Everybody’s happy! No amount of conventional paid advertising could equal the impact of this single event. And, apart from printing up a few posters and sending out a press release, it doesn’t cost the pub a penny to organise.
To pull off a successful PR charity stunt, all you need is a good idea and the momentum to follow it through. If what you’re doing is sufficiently ‘sticky’, you can rely on people to tweet of their own volition.
Next time: how to write a damn good press release to support your charity event
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