ParcoPI- a buzz campaign with a kick
Back in July, a few billboards appeared around the country (primarily in new York, Chicago and Los Angeles) purporting to be from a wife to her cheating husband. Emily accused Steven of cheating on her with her best friend and vowing revenge, according to her blog. Pictures appeared on popular gossip blogs and TV shows tried to get Emily to appear and spill the beans. However, within 24 hours, the wronged wife was found to be a marketing campaign for Court TV’s Parco PI. As stated in the NYT (registration needed), the marketers did not expect to be busted so quickly. But when you are doing a buzz campaign, sometimes you can get too much of a good thing.
By sending out similar messages to the popular blogs, it gets easy to spot the message. Yes, the blogs have an audience which may be perfect for your demo, but the audiences can overlap. And if you are trying to be covert and pretending this is for real, it can blow up in a nasty way. Look at Walmart! As well as sending out tip emails, the Emily character was also posting on women’s self-help message boards looking for sympathy, an action that resulted in a lot of backlash in those community groups.
But even with the rapid discovery, that did not necessarily stop people visiting the site. traffic continued to grow as the story of Emily’s revenge developed. She posted videos, handed out fliers. Told a story. And that’s the key here. It was still entertainment, a story to follow and find out what happens next. Court TV were lucky in this case, their lack of transparency did not affect them as much as it could have; they rapidly changed track, stopped posting as a ‘real’ person in inappropriate places and focused on telling the story.
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POSTED IN: Buzz Marketing, TV, Viral Marketing
1 opinion for ParcoPI- a buzz campaign with a kick
Court TV and Save My Husband
Jun 11, 2007 at 4:39 pm
[…] along with sponsors Suzuki and Applebees, are pushing boundaries again. After the CourtTV campaign That Girl Emily to promote Parco PI, they are now taking it a step further with a fully fledged ARG attempt. But not […]
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