TORMENTED BY THE
WITCH
Unconventional marketing success stories are entirely puzzling to large corporations""" any have tried to understand the magic behind unorthodox brands like Starbucks, Red Bull or the entertainment favorite, “The Blair Witch Project”, and try to draw actionable learnings from them.
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These are brands that have achieved fast, seemingly inexpensive, and sustaining success with a revolutionary go-to-market template. They seem like a miracle to the corporate elite, are often cited to the troops, but are mostly misinterpreted. Blair Witch has probably run more havoc in the world of marketing than any other case study since Bill Bernbach’s groundbreaking advertising work for VW in the 60’s.
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2 A former senior exec at P&G admitted in an email to us: “P&G went through a state where it was all about seeding and unconventional approaches. The BIG case study was The Blair Witch Project. Several brands then tried this approach, including Physique in the US. After a year, they looked at the data and concluded -- shit, we've got incredibly low awareness! I think it all depends what you are trying to achieve. Physique wanted to be a major player -- and hence needed a more conventional approach. But if you're starting a new category and are willing to be patient, then the stealth approach makes every sense. The risk of big bang is that you spend all the money and it doesn't work. Risk of stealth is that you never get off the ground.” To be blunt, P&G may have oversimplified things and missed some of the crucial nuances of the Blair Witch launch…Let’s take a closer look:
Behind the scenes of the project “The Blair Witch Project” is a powerful display of getting an audience deep into an experience through many, smaller initiatives. It was a tactical masterpiece full of subconscious techniques to make an audience believe they are in charge of the buzz and success surrounding the film. It is also an important lesson in thorough and lengthy orchestration, rather than a short-term, quick hit. The film itself is arguably mediocre, but Blair Witch will forever be remembered as the first movie successfully marketed via guerrilla and internet tactics, even if this interpretation isn’t entirely correct. The real key to the sleeper hit of 1999 was that they stumbled upon a new way to market – instead of broadcasting a product message, they facilitated a big social idea. The filmmakers, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, knew they had quite a challenge on their hands – they had very little money and at the beginning no distributor. So, instead of spreading a message about the movie, they decided to spread a message about its premise - did three film students actually die in the woods? Was Blair Witch a snuff movie or not? This insight was pivotal, because it tapped into a fundamental social phenomenon – gossip and rumors. Humans are wired for casual social conversation – it’s how we bond, build ties and establish hierarchies (those in-the-know rank higher). Positioning Blair Witch as an urban myth played perfectly into this human tendency. It made people talk about the movie. Secondly, the team facilitated the spreading of the Blair Witch myth. And they targeted several initiatives towards the right audiences, at the right time. Let’s take a look at some of the techniques used:
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Establish the myth before announcing the movie The most radical marketing strategy that Blair Witch introduced was a two-year pre-seeding phase of the urban legend, before they even announced the movie itself. Early movie clips were introduced as actual “found” footage rather than a preview of an upcoming film.
Early seeding within independent film subculture & internet geeks Myrick and Sanchez knew that the film would only initially attract interest among the fringe. So they targeted people like themselves – film buffs, horror freaks and Internet junkies. It was first mentioned on John Pierson’s Split Screen Show, an insider’s program aired on Bravo and IFC, in August 1997, two years before the release. Then, the next major publicity effort came only a year later in June 1998, when the pair launched the web site. Although there’s some debate as to whether or not Myrick and Sanchez planted discussion boards during this time, what’s clear is that legitimate threads did develop, debating and spreading the mythology.
Seduction of the film press and elite Another innovation was Myrick and Sanchez’s insistence on treating the film elite like another audience. The film cognoscenti too needed to be wooed – first in order to get a distributor and second, in order to control the buzz. At the Sundance Film Festival, “missing” leaflets with pictures of the “lost” filmmakers were put up all over Park City, Utah (Artisan bought rights after the festival). No critic previews were given – allowing Artisan to control the message (its about the social idea not the movie quality) and heighten interest. A risky tactic that worked.
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Keeping it exclusive In the months leading up to the release, Artisan kept the communication exclusive to the film and horror crowd. The first trailer appeared on the Ain’t It Cool News site in April 1999. The film was screened at forty colleges (as opposed to with critics). Three person teams blanketed campuses with stick figures and the proven successful “missing” flyers to add to the mystique. They revised the web site, updating it with “evidence” about the case – interviews with the police, pages found from the missing filmmaker’s web sites, etc. This insider information rewarded the most loyal fans and fed the growing buzz.
Staggered media Despite popular belief, Blair Witch’s success was not entirely web based. But it was the primary medium used up to the week of release. By then, the campaign had generated enough attention to go broad. Media kept building on each other. From the web to cable TV, independent weeklies and radio, to finally broadcast TV and major newspapers. (That’s one of the major points the P&G analysis missed: A seeding strategy must go mainstream after its launch. While it is right to initially get an exclusive early market deep into the brand experience through subconscious techniques, the strategy must change over time to appeal to the mass market. Conventional marketing techniques like advertising are then used to create mass awareness and reassurance for a more risk-averse consumer.) Even though, Artisan went mainstream around the time of their release, they did not forget their core audience. They co-produced with the SciFi channel a “documentary” about the curse of the Blair Witch. They aired it late at night a few days before the release. This documentary not only blurred the line between fact and fiction more, it also made those who watched it feel special, like they discovered privileged information.
Rationing distribution Lastly, Artisan knew they needed to keep the momentum going during the first few weeks. So, they decided to make the viewing experience exclusive by limiting distribution in the first three weeks: “It’s a difficult ticket to get, which was part of the concept. People do have the experience of going and not being able to get in,” explained Artisan co-president Amir Malin. This created long lines, sold out theaters and heightened the buzz surrounding the film. Another benefit was that the long lines insured the early word-of-mouth would be mostly positive – who else would endure the lines except for the earliest fans? And these people who would be predisposed to liking the movie.
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The Evolution of Blair Witch Pre-Movie Announcement (1997-1998) CREATING THE MYTH
Post-Movie Announcement (1999+) ANTICIPATING THE FILM
LAUNCHING THE FILM Building Momentum Mass release Becoming the “Next Big Thing” Limited release
Seeding the Film Switching message from myth to movie Introduced at Sundance during midnight screening
Seeding the Myth A rumor starts Myrick and Sanchez appear on John Pierson’s Split Screen Show They show eight minutes of footage claiming that it was found in the woods
Growing the Myth
Artisan buys distribution rights for $1 million
The rumor spreads
Pre-screened at 40 colleges with students, but not with critics
Second clip is shown on Split Screen Show Pierson invites viewers to debate the rumor online Blair Witch web site goes live Team spreads misinformation and drives traffic to web site
The rumor of the missing students is planted
Creating the Right Context
Mentioned on Ain’t It Cool News web site
Debuts at NYC’s Angelika Film Center Limited distribution, creating long lines and great PR Advertising starts in phases, print, radio and then TV
Wide-release in 2,000+ theaters 90% of advertising budget spent during this phase Comic book, CD and book released Film racks up $224 million at the box office
Web site gets 650,000 hits a day Media jumps on bandwagon, directors appear on cover of Time Magazine
Trailers shown on Ain’t It Cool, MTV and after Star Wars movie Add more “evidence” to the web site, created fake fan sites Curse of the Blair Witch “mockumentary” airs on SciFi Channel
Orchestrating an Over-Night Sensation
In the end, Blair Witch became the most profitable film in history – bringing in $241 million. Not bad for a movie which cost $35,000 to produce. Artisan, though, did not fully comprehend the magic behind the film’s success themselves. Otherwise, they would have never attempted a sequel. If they wanted to milk the franchise any further, they should have expanded into other products and media, rather than create a second film. The cover was blown. The mystery no longer existed. It was purely a film, not potentially an extreme real documentary, and this lack of intrigue exposed the film as a mediocre copycat, potentially even damaging the original.
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The fallacy of Blair Witch’s success John Hegeman, the marketer at Artisan behind the movie’s success admitted, “The marketing can never be re-created because the stars will never be aligned the same way again.” He may be right, but a whole lot of folks – inside the entertainment industry and out – have tried to copy the Blair Witch blue print, but have mostly fallen into the trap of drawing misleading conclusions. Let’s take a closer look at the marketing of “Man on the Moon”, the Andy Kaufman biopic starring Jim Carrey. In several press interviews, Universal Studios had eluded to Blair Witch being the template for its marketing. In retrospect (always a nice position to find yourself in), they may have drawn the wrong conclusions.
The studio focused on building a cool web site rather than amplifying a social truth The underpinning of BW’s success was that it tapped into a social truth – people are fascinated by horror and love to spread rumors. The web site was important only because it facilitated and amplified this truth. Universal (and a lot of other studios) didn’t get this. Instead of finding a big idea about Andy Kaufman, they choose to build a cool fan site and conduct obscure stunts, like Kaufmanesque public behavior by Jim Carrey. While these initiatives were relevant for existing fans – they weren’t big enough to translate to the mainstream.
The studio chased trendsetters rather than seed early markets Although Blair Witch became the in-movie of the summer of 1999, they didn’t start out by chasing trendsetters. Artisan seemed to understand the respective and sequential roles innovators and early adopters play within an early market: • The fringe within early markets facilitates innovation • The collective of opinion leaders influences mass adoption Initiatives like films, music or fashion, in fact, any shared entertainment product or badge, are treated as social currency. They run the high risk of embarrassing oneself with a bad recommendation or the wrong fashion item, but the rewards for being seen as a trusted source and trendsetter is even higher. These trendsetters (or early adopters) in return are generally influenced themselves by social outliers. Let’s call these innovators the influencers of the influencers. This all sets in motion a linear pattern of influence from the extreme fringe all the way to the mainstream. In their book The Deviant’s Advantage, Mathews and Wacker go into quite some detail on setting social convention. They describe the pattern as “the movement from the Fringe, to the Edge, to the Realm of the Cool, to the Next Big Thing, and, finally, to social convention.”
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7 We call it the ripple effect: where the idea spreads from the fringe towards opinion leaders in several self-referencing stages.
Blair Witch did this well, when they Internet Junkies first targeted internet junkies and Hardcore Movie Buffs hardcore film buffs through postings Art House Movie Goers at film sites on the Web. Then they seduced elite art house fans with their publicity stunts during the Sundance Film Festival (they plastered the town with stick figures and missing leaflets with the actors faces on them). Next they enticed more mainstream art house fans through a screening tour at forty colleges and universities. They hired students to publicize the screenings by canvassing campuses with sticks figures and flyers. At the same time, the team added complexity to the web site building a full-blown mythology around the curse of the Blair Witch. This rewarded early fans with insider information. It wasn’t until the initiative created buzz among these communities and the film was released, that Artisan advertised Blair Witch to mainstream moviegoers. Most marketers do not follow this model. They don’t pay attention to the linear pattern, opting instead to seed opinion leaders right away – or even worse – seed mutually exclusive targets, thereby bypassing the opportunity to create an exponential following for an initiative. Instead of duplicating this ripple effect for Man on the Moon, Universal targeted “trendsetters”. They plastered city streets with wild postings, hoping that urban hipsters would get excited and talk about the new movie. The Andy Kaufman sticker campaign by Shepard Fairey had no relevance for the twenty-something crowd – they were too young to remember the glory days of Saturday Night Live. On top, the ubiquitous stickers were a copycat of Fairey’s earlier “Obey” guerrilla artist campaign featuring Andre the Giant.
The studio fabricated “news” rather than facilitate interpersonal communication Artisan facilitated P2P communication by doing a lot of little things: the web site, canvassing college campuses with “missing” leaflets and stick figures, advertising in alternative weeklies, producing the SciFi documentary and the like. By playing poker face about the truth of the movie and devising fresh tactics – they kept up the buzz and misinformation happened organically. On the other hand, marketers often seed misinformation to create talk, but lacking that big idea and the right subcultures – their efforts result in short term hype rather than sustaining buzz. Thus, when Universal seeded misinformation about the movie to create talk, but lacking that big idea and the right subcultures – their efforts made a minimal impact.
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8 Blair Witch: The Facts Behind the Myth “The web site … looks anything but low-budget. The Story and Synopsis are fantastic; when we first came upon this site, we thought that the movie was a documentary – they’ve done that good a job of creating an extensive background to their story! Okay, so maybe we’re just naive. Either way, this is a site you should definitely check out. Make sure you download the trailer.” - from The Wild, Wild, Web, August 1997
If you think this review is about the vaunted Blair Witch web site, you’re wrong. Notice the date, it’s written over a year before Blair launched its web site. This little fact implies that Blair isn’t as innovative as its backers wanted us to think. This Wild, Wild, Web review is for the web site of “The Last Broadcast”, an independent film, which came out in 1998, a year before the release of Blair Witch. While the mainstream press was busy falling over themselves praising the uniqueness and innovativeness of Blair Witch, citing everything from the filming, plot, web site to marketing tactics, the indie film press investigated the suspicious similarities between Blair and its predecessor.
Plot The plot for Blair Witch is a striking parallel to The Last Broadcast. Broadcast is about a four members of a cable access show called “Fact or Fiction” who venture into New Jersey’s Pine Barrens in search of the Jersey Devil. One by one, crewmembers disappear or are murdered. The video footage of their gruesome demise is found. The film is a mock documentary tracing the history of the lost crew, mixing “the found footage” with interviews of friends, locals etc. The directors, Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler, weren’t too miffed by the similarities in plot between Blair and Broadcast, saying: “No, we’re not going to sue, man. There’s no such thing as original or innovative [storylines].” In addition, they also felt like Myrick and Sanchez made an effort to reduce the unfortunate similarities between the two films. In the summer of 1998 as Broadcast was touring independent festivals, Myrick and Sanchez were editing Blair Witch. They scrapped all the interview footage, opting instead to make Blair, a movie of the found footage only.
Web site Much has been made about the cleverness of the Blair Witch web site. However, contrary to popular belief, it is not original. It is almost an exact reproduction of Broadcast’s web site which came out fifteen months earlier. “Both web sites encourage the viewer to believe the respective film is real, with features that include a timeline of fictitious events, biographies of the lost ‘filmmakers’, an introductory summary of the occurrence, fabricated ‘interviews’ with those involved and grainy evidence photos from the ‘crime scene’” (The 11th Hour).
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9 The irony is that the Broadcast site itself borrowed heavily from another film site, a documentary called “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills”. Avalos freely admits that he copied from this site, but Myrick and Sanchez have been less forthcoming. When pushed, they admitted to Diane Sawyer that they did see The Last Broadcast’s web site during the making of Blair Witch, but they did not admit to anything else.
Marketing Avalos and Weiler also came up with the innovative trailers and flyers, which Blair Witch imitated. Because the two didn’t have a lot of money, Broadcast’s trailers weren’t like typical Hollywood trailers with voiceovers, a score etc. It was just a clip from their movie, simulating the cinéma vérité of the script. Of course, Artisan did this as well. Who can forget the famous trailer with Heather Donohue, eyes bloodshot and terrified, breathing heavily into the camera? In 1998, Broadcast went to five film festivals. As part of the promotion, Avalos and Weiler created flyers about the missing film crew. “We had people handing out flyers – weird flyers, you know? ‘Four people went in and out – what really happened?’ Our flyers were always set up as fact as fiction,” Avalos says. In Park City and on college campuses, Blair Witch copied this tactic, plastering these towns with “Missing” flyers and stick figures, which by the way, were original. So, if the two movies were so similar, why did Blair Witch succeed when The Last Broadcast failed (Broadcast never made it to big screen, but has done well in video because of the controversy)? One reason is that Avalos and Weiler did not pre-seed the myth of the missing crew and the Jersey Devil. Even though, they were clever with the web site and the marketing of the movie at festivals, these efforts were primarily about promoting the movie. If they had created a larger context, they might have garnered more attention outside of the independent film crowd. The second reason for Blair Witch’s astounding success is good old-fashioned show biz connections. Even though the media played up the newcomer status of Myrick and Sanchez, they failed to mention that the two had the backing of an indie film veteran, John Pierson. He invested $10,000 for the filming. He gave the Blair Witch myth its first public exposure on his Split Screen Show. He was the one who encouraged his fans to debate the truth of Blair Witch on his web site. And he was and is a member of the Sundance Film Festival Committee. Which brings us to the last coincidence. Last Broadcast was actually a fairly successful indie film. In 1998, Sundance planned to premiere the movie in their midnight slot, but at the last minute, the film was mysteriously rejected. Of course, Blair Witch took this honor a year later and the rest, as they say, is history.
Alex Wipperfürth (alex@plan-b.biz) is a Partner at marketing boutique Plan B in San Francisco. The Blair Witch case study is an excerpt from his upcoming book Brand Hijack.
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