Uncovering a Viral Marketing Campaign

It all started with an unusual e-mail to Franklin Avenue:

Hi!

I love your site, I just saw a post about this on a different website and was wondering if you’d either seen the posters or heard anything about it, I’ve seen them everywhere in my neighborhood lately. Hope you’re having a good day!

The email included a link to this MySpace page. Usually e-mail that doesn’t actually address us by name is spam, and immediately thrown into the trash. But I decided to check out the link.

What I saw was clearly some sort of stunt. The flyer (seen above) was too slickly produced (and not at all what a real missing poster would look like — if your friend is missing, you don’t lead off with some catchy slogan like “Where is Amy Pressman?”), the photo too headshot-ready. The setup too much in the vein of “Lonelygirl15.” The MySpace page is filled with big, gimmicky question marks.

The narrative was also off. Supposedly the whole Pressman family is missing, yet the flyer and so-called cousin is only interested in “Amy.” An excerpt from the site:

Hello All, I am Taylor the cousin of Amy Pressman. As some of you know she went missing. The authorities as usual are “doing all they can”. I have decided to do my part

June 2nd, 2007 The Pressman Family departed from southern California on a road trip in the family R.V. They never returned. A suspicious blog was left on Amy Pressman’s Myspace page days into the trip.

We fear the worst for the Pressman family, but the final blog leads me to believe Amy is still alive and out there.

(“A suspicious blog”? I find it funny when people refer to blog posts as “a blog.”)

Enough people seemed to believe the story that I was suddenly interested in finding out who really was behind it. I decided to check WHOIS to see if anyone had registered the domain “whereisamypressman.com.” Sure enough, I found this:

Fourth Floor Productions
14275 dickens st #11
Sherman Okas, California 91423
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: WHEREISAMYPRESSMAN.COM
Created on: 13-Jul-07
Expires on: 14-Jul-09
Last Updated on: 13-Jul-07

By the way, it’s not hard to cover up your info with GoDaddy. (I do it with the Franklin Avenue domains — don’t need any of you sneaking around our garbage cans.) It’s a few bucks more, but if you’re looking to keep the source of a viral marketing campaign a mystery, I’d advise spending the extra dollars.

Meanwhile, here’s how Fourth Floor Prods. describes itself on its website:

“The Young Guns of Hollywood are in town and stirring up some trouble. Looking to make the mark in the ever-competitive film industry. This group is comprised of some seriously talented people; creating not just future works of art, but a buzz they seem to call, Controversial Marketing.

“Knowing that great films could never be seen without great advertising, Fourth Floor Productions strive to create both New and Fresh media that will be talked about for years.”

Mystery solved. Not sure if “Where Is Amy Pressman?” is a indie film, a website akin to Lonelygirl, or what, but it’s definitely not a real missing girl.

Does viral stuff like this work? I dunno, but I somehow find myself writing a post about it, patting myself on the back for figuring it out. Or is that what they wanted? Damn, I’ve been had.

Did The "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" Viral Marketing Campaign Go Too Far?

I’m of the mind that not only did Boston over-react, but even more embarrassingly, the media has turned this into yet another pointless circus.

Yes, the lite-brite boards promoting the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” movie — placed in 10 cities around the country by guerilla marketers — were suspicious at first glance. By all means, call in the authorities. But it shouldn’t have taken long to realize this was a stupid marketing stunt. Now, with egg on their faces, Boston authorities are calling it a “terror hoax.” Um, no.

As my colleague Lisa DeMoraes at the Washington Post wrote the other day, these viral marketing campaigns are pretty damn common:

Spooky guerrilla marketing campaigns for TV series are old hat for TRWCT. Why just the other day, they all got packages from ABC Family network containing vials of white powder. The mind reels, thinking how the mayor of Boston would have reacted to one of those. (ABC Family explained that the white powder was instant faux snow and that the reporters were supposed to add water and enjoy the winter wonderland that would erupt.)

And TRWCT are still chuckling about the night during the TV Press Tour when they all returned to their hotel rooms, turned on the lights and simultaneously broke the standing high-jump record upon discovering someone had broken into their rooms and scrawled the word “Redrum” in lipstick across their bathroom mirrors — just like Jack Nicholson did in the movie set in that Estes Park, Colo., hotel not long before he tried to separate his wife’s head from her shoulders with an ax.

It was just those pranksters at ABC marketing reminding them to be sure and review the upcoming remake of “The Shining.”

And who can forget the time — another press tour — when TRWCT returned to their hotel rooms — again, late at night — to discover their bathrooms were cordoned off with police crime-scene tape. That one went over particularly well with The Women Who Cover Television.

More recently, in March ’05, the merry marketing pranksters at NBC were sent out to write “Omnium finis imminet” — loosely, “The end is near” — on trash cans, buildings and sidewalks in cities nationwide. They took snaps of their work and posted those images on the Internet. Interestingly, that campaign did not cause the kind of panic we saw in Boston yesterday because, of course, no one in this country knows Latin.

Read her whole, witty as always, column for a good and dripping-with-sarcasm perspective on both how inane viral marketing is… and how even more inane Boston’s reaction was.

As for me… you can see me mouthing off about the controversy on yesterday’s edition of G4′s “Attack of the Show.” You can watch the video here.