Down the Rabbit Hole

As all of this pseudo-content made its way online, the dance grew even more complex. At one point when the team thought the tension on the message boards was dissipating, it created Gamer Chuck, a character playing the role of a Sega employee trying to pass himself off as a hip gamer. As Chuck trashed Beta-7 and his conspiracy theories on his Web site, the boards went wild. Everyone who had been leery of Beta-7--suspecting that he was a marketing tool--started bashing his new nemesis, who was clearly a corporate Trojan horse. "It got pretty meta," Monello chuckles, "but as soon as the site launched, it worked."

"Viral is the opposite of brute force," Hale says. "The more force you use, the less viral it becomes."

"Beta-7" ultimately clocked some 2.2 million followers and, for $300,000 (excluding TV spots), helped Sega top sales projections by 25% in a category overwhelmingly dominated by Madden. Along the way, however, Campfire had done something else: It proved that a young, cynical, media-saturated audience just might be willing to listen to marketers as long as they showed some respect. "The virtue of their work," says ESPN's Daly, "is that if you're on the side of the equation that believes [the hoax], then it's fascinating, and if you're on the side that gets that it's not real, then it's just great entertainment."

In other words, Campfire expands its audience by drawing in the gullible, the curious, and the merely bored--simultaneously. According to Chip Heath, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's B-school and author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Random House, January 2007), that's the same broad appeal that pulls people into tabloid gossip or urban myths. Campfire's work, he says, capitalizes on the "curiosity gap," a term coined in the 1990s by George Loewenstein, a Carnegie Mellon academic who studied the psychology of curiosity, and which refers to the addictive pull people experience when their preconceived ideas are challenged. For the gap to work, though, the audience needs enough backstory and a sufficient flow of detail to keep it guessing. Campfire maintains this tension by creating ever more gaps and, crucially, never sliding into low-grade fictions.

It's easy to get people curious, Heath points out, it's keeping them that way that's the challenge. "I think that's where companies fall prey," he says. "We see a lot of people trying to use the same curiosity-gap technique, but then not delivering value or entertainment. It's like when someone tells you a bad punch line [to a joke]. You're kind of irritated because they haven't delivered on the anticipation and expectation they set up."

Contagion 1

As it happens, Hale and Monello know about entertainment and audience building. They got their initiation with none other than The Blair Witch Project, the lost-in-the-woods horror flick that they, along with three other partners, made for $22,000 and parlayed into a $248 million take at the box office in 1999, an indie-film record. Hale and Monello talk about Blair as if it were a school they attended, and in a sense it was. In making it, they essentially broke all the rules of filmmaking and marketing: They used no-name actors, no script, and in 1998, a year before the film was released (or was even purchased by its distributor, Artisan), they inadvertently took their marketing … online.

A virus catches on only if it forms a community where none existed. The infection feeds on fascination.

At a time when Web sites and message boards were a tiny part of the publicity machine, the Blair crew created both for a group of film geeks who'd heard about the film's "truth or myth?" premise on a 1998 Bravo special. The filmmakers channeled all their attention to this tiny fan base and soon noticed that whenever they engaged somebody one-on-one, or fed them new elements of the Blair mythology (pages from the missing students' diaries, say, or interviews with local police, all created ad hoc), the discussion board exploded. "When it started to die down," Monello recalls, "we'd look at each other and go, 'What are we going to do to pump it up?'"

What they did was tease out the story further and further, creating an ever more elaborate warren of "rabbit holes," or seductive entry points into the narrative. To prime the palates of the conspiracy junkies, a month before the film premiered, they cut a deal with the Sci Fi channel to run a one-hour pseudo-documentary about the Blair myth, which, like Bravo's special, played the story straight. Even the film's trailers were designed to intrigue, not to explain: They ran for under a minute with only a black screen, grinding noises, the protagonist's terrified monologue, and the film's URL.