Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is a form of internet advertisement that is said to be word of mouth, it is any form of internet marketing specificaly social networks that is sent or put on one website and then the message spreads by word of mouth. This is a growing form of promotion as the amount of Internet users is rapidly growing. As well as this there are now many social networking websites around for example Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and MSN. As well as companies and products being advertised on these sites films are hyped up and advertised on them. Many films create pages for their characters or make websites for there films and upload their trailers and T.V spots to YouTube.

A good example of how a film has used viral marketing is Cloverfield who first distributed a teaser trailer with no film name, just a website. When you logged onto this website which was the date of the film release (http://www.1-18-08.com/) it just had a pile of pictures with dates on them that you could move around to look at better (An image of this is below). Some of these pictures were clear pictures of friends and a party whilst others were very mysterious with effects on top of them making it very unclear of what they are of. This created even more of a hype and got people excited and talking about it on social networking website.

Cloverfield also used Facebook and MySpace to create pages for the characters of the film. This created even more hype for the film; there were links to these pages on the website. This made the film very up to date and accessible.