I went to this conference called “Internet Research 12” where the focus was on people using the internet to pull data. One of the keynote speakers was Mike Minello with a marketing agency called Campfire. Wow! Advertising people are fun!
I had never heard this guy’s name but I was familiar with a lot of his work, and I never knew that it was all coming from the same team. I am going to describe his projects and then their common relevance. I am not sure exactly what part Minello had in all these, but he was intimately involved.
The Blair Witch Project was a 1999 American horror movie. The premise of the film was that three college students were using their own camera to make a documentary about a witch in a forest, and the witch haunts them. The movie is shot not as a professional would, but as if the students in the movie were actually filming each other. The movie gives the idea that it is a real documentary. To go with the movie, there were websites set up wherein people could talk about the Blair Witch, and collectively visitors to the website all pretended together that the movie was real, and that the witch has a long history, and that they had evidence of haunting. All of this was a complete advertisement, but in 1999, people were just discovering internet and being able to participate in both watching a movie and talking about how the movie was real excited a lot of people. As an advertising campaign it was successful. This low-budget movie became one of the hits of the year, out-competing Hollywood movies. The interesting part about this was that the general public became free advertisers for the movie because when they participated in discussion, they were advertising. Minello said that the online fanbase was about 1000 people, and they sparked national attention. Minello compared their treatment of Blair Witch’s fanbase to the Hollywood company Paramount’s treatment of theirs – they were sending cease and desist legal threats to people who were discussing the popular show Star Trek on their websites, because they wanted to have total control of all discussion.
In 2005 he was involved with another ad campaign which I knew very well – Audi’s “Art of the Heist”. Audi is a car company and they had this new car they wanted to advertise. Instead of presenting they car at a national car show as is traditionally done, they promised to present it but then in its place put up notices that the car had been stolen. They had a website setup where they gave evidence of where the car was, and public could respond to that evidence. This was the campaign – the car was not really stolen and the evidence was fake, but participating in the recovery of the car was a game. Instead of showing the car around the country, they had actors staged pretending to be detectives at public festivals who would get people involved in finding the thieves, who would be scheduled to make an appearance. The campaign was set up so that it would look real, but as soon as someone asked a single question on the website or pressed the actors, they would come to know that it is a game for them. The campaign was very successful – more than 10,000 people took time out of their lives to post “clues” or report evidence about seeing the stolen car.
Minello also did the ad campaigns for HBO’s tv shows True Blood and Game of Thrones. True Blood is a show about vampires who drink fake blood from laboratories so that they do not have to kill humans. The ad campaign for this was that they sent this fake blood from the tv show to popular YouTube vloggers and asked them to drink the blood on webcam. People did, and so again they got volunteer advertisers. Game of Thrones is a show which takes place in medieval times, and they sent ancient scrolls out for popular vloggers to discuss. Again, people did this on camera. They had fun, so did their viewers, and HBO got cheap personal advertising.
Minello ended by talking about the history of using the public to advertise among themselves. He cited the stories of Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic, the two restauranteurs who developed the concept of a Tiki Bar. A Tiki Bar is a bar, club, or restaurant decorated in Polynesian theme which encourages guests to pretend that they are on a tropical island while they are visiting. The attraction to the bar is not primarily the bar itself, but the fact that the patrons are supposed to all pretend among themselves that they are beach explorers.
The other example he gave was of the exit to the funhouse at Steeplechase Amusement Park on Coney Island. The situation was that there was a funhouse where visitors would pay to enter and then be continually disturbed with moving floor, strange lights, and various distractions as they walked through the house. At the end there was a place where the public could see people in the house looking scared or confused, but the people inside could not see their audience. When they left the house, they would come to know that people had been laughing at them and they themselves could join the audience and laugh at the next to arrive. The attraction was the customers, not the premises.
At question time I asked Minello the most pressing question I had and one that I had trouble holding in during the talk – “What does your company promise to your clients in terms of metrics of success, and how can you predict whether a campaign will work?” His answer was that he had no metrics and made promises based on no science. The only promise he could make was that if he did a campaign similar to a previous campaign, then presumably the interests of society have not changed and a similar result will come.
After the presentation I talked to some people about this guy, and many of them said that he talked too much and gave too many examples. I myself did not get enough.