He woke up in a pool of sweat, with bruises on his arms, his ankle badly swollen. He'd had another terrifying blackout, the kind he'd been experiencing ever since he began beta-testing Sega's soon-to-be-released ESPN NFL Football 2K4 video game. Now his neighbor was banging on his front door: "My wife's been crying all night! Why don't you try a move like that with me, tough guy?" One more innocent victim. No doubt he'd attacked her, too, like an animal going in for the kill. Beta-7, as the twentysomething man came to be known, could find no explanation for his horrifying behavior, unless the Sega game was somehow torquing his brain. And so Beta-7 began his desperate attempt to prevent the game's release and expose the company's conspiracy and lies. As he searched for a reason for his sudden violent surges--his compulsion to tackle perfect strangers--he found himself tracing a labyrinthine trail of evidence. He hacked into a Web site that contained medical records of twisted experiments performed on fellow gamers. He found and reconstructed shredded Sega memos that admitted the game should not be released. He even unearthed video outtakes of spokesman Warren Sapp insisting that the game would not cause violence in its players. Beta-7 spent three months searching for answers, answers that never arrived. A week after Sega released the game, Beta-7--along with his computer and Xbox--disappeared, leaving behind only a few photographs of his ransacked apartment, uploaded to his blog by a distraught friend.
It's a dark and disturbing tale. And, of course, it's utterly bogus, a fiction engineered in a strip mall in Orlando. There, surrounded by tiki mugs and other high kitsch, Mike Monello, a hefty 37-year-old with bulbous hazel eyes, and Jim Gunshanan, a local writer he'd hired to play Beta-7 day and night, lived the charade in real-time for 90 days. The elaborate 2003 stunt was a viral marketing campaign dreamed up at Monello's postmodern production shop, now called Campfire, and ESPN's ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, to help their client mount a challenge to
Monello and his partners at Campfire, Gregg Hale and Steve Wax, have become the high-wire stuntmen of viral marketing. In the past few years, the tiny outfit with offices in Orlando and New York has been the invisible force behind the country's most groundbreaking viral campaigns--nonlinear, interactive advertising that starts out niche and then metastasizes. Besides "Beta-7," their work includes Audi's "The Art of the Heist," as well as campaigns for Levi's, Sharp, Hewlett-Packard, and MSN. And now the Campfire trio is trying to spread a bug for its latest client, Pontiac.
These days, creating a successful viral campaign--that addictive, self-propagating advertainment that lives on Web sites, blogs, cell phones, message boards, and even in real-world stunts--is the dream of every marketer and ad shop. It's a way to reach an ad-allergic audience and get it not only to notice your brand but to physically interact with it, to live it. Cracking the viral code is no small feat, though. JupiterResearch recently reported that while marketers are increasingly trying to insinuate themselves into social media like blogs and MySpace, 69% of users are skeptical. And as willing as consumers may be to suspend disbelief for a compelling fiction such as "Beta-7," they'll turn on you in a heartbeat. "The bottom line is that viral marketing is so not trusted by people that marketers can go a long way toward making people hate your guts if [they] don't do it right," says Lee Ann Daly, ESPN's former executive vice president of marketing. Or as Hale puts it, black socks under his black Velcro sandals: "Viral is the opposite of brute force. The more brute force you try to use, the less viral it becomes, because people don't want to pass on pure marketing messages."
So what's the trick? Obsession. Observation. Overkill. Creating a viral campaign isn't like filming a 30-second spot and then sitting back and letting it run. It's a marathon, one that takes mastery of numerous media and the creativity to spin out a form of open-ended, multilayered, living entertainment that will keep an audience engaged for as long as possible. On the Sega campaign, which Monello compares to "a three-month-long Saturday Night Live skit," the team began by writing months' worth of backlogged blog entries to give Beta-7 a history. When it decided to create the medical Web site, it researched how video games might affect the brain--and had an art director scribble the doctors' notes--so the documents would look legit. It even taped ambush video of the game's real programmers denying Beta-7's charges.
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