This post in the InfoTech Watch caught my attention as it was about the phenomenal marketing success of the Samuel L Jackson flick - Snakes on a Plane, using the Internet as the main tool. The movie was all over the Net, and this didn’t escape the eyes of yours truly as well. Forget about movie forums, review sites etc, the movie was talked about in many personal blogs that attracted many comments. The author rightly noticed this and the clips in YouTube as well. A search there now yielded 277 results there, many of which have very high rating. Well, the world loves comedy and this could be a very good indicator.
However, the point here is not the movie itself. It is about how this is proving to be a case study where Web 2.0 can be used as a cheap and highly effective marketing tool for not only movies, but other products as well. You see, social networks, communities, blogs, podcasts etc are changing public opinion and influencing thoughts. This had to happen sooner than later, but Snakes on the Plane is one case study marketers can emulate.
The success story of the marketing of the flick using Web 2.0 tools can also be credited to the movie producers who took the discussions, reviews and overall presence of the movie on the Internet very seriously and hit the iron when it was hot.
The use of this tool has been outstandingly remarkable as the post say - ‘both in terms of its general creativity as well as its technological execution‘. Yes indeed! For example, to spread the message and popularize it the website snakesonaplane.varitalk.com asks you for your name and the name of someone whom you would like to send a personalized recorded message from Samuel L. Jackson about the movie much like sending an e-card or a gift. Then you can opt to use e-mail, or you can choose to send the message in Samuel’s voice in the recipient’s phone number.
The tech used in the site is called Modulate 2.0 developed by Chicago-based company VariTalk. According to the post, Modulate is a the company’s Concatenated Digital Media Server about which the company’s site says can deliver personalized audio output that cannot be distinguished from a real human voice. It also claims that ‘Modulate can generate and encode more than 500 fully personalized 60-second audio applications per second on a single host‘. WOW!
The author of the post, Ted Samson has promised to get more on the tech itself once he has a chance to talk to the VariTalk CTO. Trust me mate, I shall be glued on to your blog.
To conclude, this is just the beginning of such marketing tactics. We are going to see far more success stories of Web 2.0 marketing. The best part of this is that anything interesting here spreads like viral and virals are not so bad after all. Snakes on a Plane shows you why.
Thanks Ted.
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