Viral Horror: The Paranormal Activity Campaign
As the Internet increasing empowers the voices it’s every day users, Hollywood places more and more reliance on audience members to spread the word about new films. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to see studios using creative marketing techniques in hopes of becoming viral, such as Disney/Pixar’s campaign of faux-vintage toy commercials implicitly promoting Toy Story 3. However, one of the pioneers of this audience-members-as-grassroots-marketers method was a 2009 digital horror film with a miniscule budget– Paranormal Activity.
After Paramount bought the rights to the independently produced found-footage feature, they gave it a limited release in September of 2009. Following a successful but small first run, Paramount launched a “Demand It” campaign on the Paranormal Activity website. Visiting the site, fans could select a “Demand It” button and request the film be screened in their hometown/city. If a million people demanded the film, it would be released worldwide. The website encouraged people to spread the word about Paranormal Activity, and provided an easy one-click sharing option. Twitter and Facebook proved to be most effective in this campaign, and within four days the one million demands had been reached.
Once Paranormal Activity premiered, the studio kept the film’s social media presence hot by encouraging audience members to “Tweet their Screams” – write about their experience via Twitter. This facet also proved to be highly successful, helping the film to gross over $100 million as well as become a well-known staple in current popular culture. The film’s subsequent three sequels have continued to use the “Tweet Your Scream” (@ParanormalActivity) promotional tool.
Even though the fourth film just came out this month, the franchise seems to be broadening to more indirect social media tactics for what appears to be the fifth installment. As Dread Central reports, clues about the possible next film have surfaced via a Facebook and YouTube account belonging to a “Jacob Degloshi.” Though Mr. Degloshi has only posted a few things, minute details in his videos and statuses hint that he is a fictional character existing in the PA world. Fans of the series (as well as non-fans that just happen to be curious about this interesting marketing strategy) are sure to remain vigilant, just as the studio intended.
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Depending on what is being marketed, this strategy of creating hype has seemed to work quite often. I’m sure in the case of a scary movie, its core audience would get excited about hype. And worse case scenario for the marketers, if the movie disappoints the audience after possibly too much hype, the movie still made money from you seeing it once. However, instead of overhype, these types of campaigns just seem to build a loyal relationship with the public. Making them people feel connected to the product on a more emotional level than just whether or not the movie will be good. I didn’t realize that was how Paranormal Activity gained popularity. Seems like an interesting campaign to keep up with on the releases of sequels.
Even though I’m finding them less and less scary as they go on, I’ll admit I saw the latest Paranormal Activity this past weekend. It’s mostly because I’ve seen each of the installments and figured I might as well keep it going. Although I do think it also has to do with all the hype the movies create. I see it all over YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. As your post indicates, this is how they’ve blossomed. Social media has had a huge impact on this movie series and I think it’s awesome that such a low budget film to begin with has escalated to such a success.
One of the predecessors to Paranormal Activity, not only in the found footage genre, but also in the viral marketing online was The Blair Witch Project ten years before. Even though it was as far back as 1999, The Blair Witch Project is generally believed to be the first major film marketed primarily on the internet. Blair Witch did focus more on fooling the audience into believing it was real documentary rather than pushing for audience request, like “Demand It.” And of course they didn’t have the advantage of Twitter back then either, but word-of-mouth still helped it gross $248.6 million at the box office.
The best part about what the word-of-mouth strategy brings to the table, is that it provides more credibility than if Time Magazine said it was the number one thriller. This is because peoples’ friends and families were talking about it, after it was interjected into their news feed, creating interest. The consumer can be the greatest promotional tool, and the greatest demotional tool. Obviously, Paramount knew that they had a winner, and through vintage marketing with modern tools, struck gold.
The people who promoted this were very smart to do so. It allowed people to encourage their family and friends to vote for the film to come to their hometown. By word of mouth people were encouraged to look at the movie’s page and spread the hype. In some cases, this technique doesn’t work because of the promotion being made, but in this case it did. And it clearly was effective enough to make several more Paranormal Activity movies following this original.