Major film studios have huge budgets
for marketing and advertising a movie for release and make it a box office
success. However, for independent filmmakers the story is different. They have
to measure very carefully how much money they can spend in marketing. Yet,
budget constraints do not have to be an obstacle for creativity. Nowadays, it
is possible to find support through social media and sponsorships to develop a good
promotional strategy. But what happened when social media was not available? One
of the most successful viral marketing strategies of all time was developed for
The Blair Witch Project in 1999, when
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube did not exist. How was this possible?
The Blair Witch Project was a movie about three student filmmakers that were investigating the
mystery behind the case of the Blair Witch through interviews of the local
people. The three students disappear and
a year later their footage was found.
The actors improvised almost all the lines, what gave the movie a real
result. The production company decided to create a low budget website (www.blairwitch.com), that is still working, to document the history
of the Blair Witch from 1785 to the day when the footage was discovered. The
website has photos, biographies and interviews with family members and is
constantly updated with new information. All the evidence made people think it
was a true story and encouraged people to talked about it. It also includes
trailers with the students’ “real videos” and news coverage of the
disappearance. The most important thing that
the team defined very well was the target market. All the ads were shown in
college campuses and created a desire to seek more information about the
story. Also, the team took care about
details such as listing the three actors as ‘missing, presumed dead’ in IMDb
before the release.
The results were incredible: for a
$25,000 movie budget, the final production grossed $248 million at the box
office (the second highest return on investment for a movie). People made long
lines to get a ticket. The success was created on uncertainty and made people
think it was a true story. With the technological advances, is very hard to
repeat a campaign like this one, but it reminds us of the importance of
originality and taking care of the small details to impress the audience.
