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MarketingSherpa Summary:
A terrific example of cost-effectively tapping into the viral power of celebrities to build your own online buzz, traffic, and ultimately brand. Within 90 days after launch nearly two million unique visitors played the game more than two times each - plus 5% traveled onwards to visit the main brand's site. And that's the entire point after all.
Agency:POD Design
Client/company: Peerflix
Brand campaign was conducted for: Peerflix
Launch date of campaign: 1/9/06
Target audience/demographic: 25-54, movie lovers, high HHI, living on the coasts, early adopters
Campaign Goal:
The core objective of Peerflix's viral marketing campaign was to build awareness of the brand.
Given that the primary objective for ALL our other marketing campaigns is to drive new customers to the service, we embarked on this project fully aware that the goal was quite broad and far reaching compared to the resources we dedicated towards the project.
Creative:
Simply put, we put together a game that pokes fun of celebrities. Peerflix is a legal, P2P network for exchanging DVDs so there is a natural fit with Hollywood.
The campaign was almost entirely focused on the development of a Flash based, 1st person game. The user is the paparazzi, and they need to take good pictures of celebrities behaving badly. There are 5 levels in all, and users get money for taking pictures of everything from 'Nikki Sheraton's' new hairdo to 'Jackson Michael's'...ummm...'nose'. The better the pictures the user takes, the more money they earn. Each level presents a different monetary goal the user needs to reach to make it to the next level. The final level finds the user in the halls of the 'Celebritology' center.
The key metric for Peerflix was the # of unique game plays. That figure has exceeded 2 million since launch in early January.
Seed Strategy:
The seeding strategy consisted of strategic placement on blogs (entertainment, gaming, etc.) and game directories (i.e. AddictingGames.com).
The agency successfully has the game placed on a number of well read blogs and message boards, while Peerflix was able to gain a placement on Addicting Games.com.
Buzz Generated:
The game was picked up by:
Entertainment Weekly,
Salon.com,
AddictingGames.com,
as well as E Online, Yahoo Hot Office Attachments, Netscape News, nd a number of other well read blogs
Specific (Goal-Related) Campaign Results:
We were able to measure the number of unique game plays, total game plays, and visits to the Peerflix.com via links embedded within the game.
As of April 4, 2006 the campaign has had 1,903017 unique visitors, and 5,568,334 visitors overall. Roughly 5% of unique visitors (100,000) also visited the Peerflix.com main site.
Biggest Learning:
Patience. A 'viral campaign' was originally slated to launch in late September. We scrapped two concepts in late 2005 because they didn't feel very....viral.
The third time turned out to be the charm, but it wasn't easy getting there. In the end, the concept for the Paparazzi game was developed by both Peerflix and POD Design, the agency who developed the game.
One of the problems with the original two concepts was that we were too detached from in the development of those ideas. In other words, we provided the agency with everything you'll find in a typical creative brief - objective, target audience, etc, but did not inject ourselves into the creative process even though we had our own ideas to share.
In the end, collaborating with the agency to develop a concept we all felt great about led to a viral marketing campaign we're all proud of.
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