A New Marketing

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The new buzz marketing campaign for The Dark Knight is either ridiculous, awesome, or ridiculously awesome. As intense/elaborate as the plan gets, it’s still contingent on one key thing: People’s willingness to tell other people.

In case you didn’t read the article above, here’s the scoop: An online game was released and the winners were eventually given the address of a real life deli where they were told to give the name “Robin Banks”. The first person to give that name at the deli was handed a cake. Inside the cake was a box with a cell phone, charger and number to call. When the person called, they were told to keep the phone on and charged at all times, and that a call would be coming soon…

Now I think this is great. This is marketing to the 10th power. It breaks so many rules because it allows people to go above and beyond, and it really sucks them in. Of course it’s prohibitively expensive to do this on a broad scale, but thats the beauty of buzz, you don’t have to.

But as cool as this is, it would have fallen flat if the person who got the cake hadn’t told their story to the world. This whole venture could have backfired if the person who got the cake, and never plugged the cell phone in. It could even have backfired if they followed all the steps, but didn’t tell anyone besides people they know.

Thats the buzz marketing linchpin.

You have to create something cool/noteworthy enough that people want to talk about it. Something that fosters conversation, discussion, and speculation.

Buzz/Viral marketing isn’t a science, but there are some things that you can do in order to increase your odds. The thing is, all of that doesn’t mean anything if no one wants to talk about it.