Down the Rabbit Hole

Stanford's Heath says such piecemeal storytelling is completely counterintuitive to traditional marketers, whose instincts are to tell stories as efficiently as possible, to reveal everything they know about a topic at once ("the curse of knowledge," he calls it). By contrast, Heath explains, "what these guys are doing is strategically hiding parts of the story in an interesting and entertaining way, and getting people motivated to figure it out for themselves." Soon enough, an obscure geek obsession with Blair spilled onto larger fan sites. Deejays started discussing the "legend" on drive-time radio. Then Artisan picked up Blair, re-created the grassroots buzz machine on a mass scale, and the rest is movie history.

The Blair experience taught Hale and Monello that the Internet wasn't just another advertising billboard (a lesson Artisan failed to retain in churning out Blair Witch II, a sexed-up, formulaic bomb). Because the Web can knit together numerous media platforms, and because it allows a story to unfold in real time, they recognized it as a new extension of the entertainment experience. As Ty Montague, chief creative officer at JWT, who hired the team for the "Beta-7" campaign in 2003, puts it: "They were the first ones to really embrace a story that arced across multiple mediums and all came together. It was a seminal moment in communications."

As Campfire perfected that mode of storytelling on "Beta-7," the team realized something else: The virus they discovered on Blair catches on only if it forges a community where none existed. The infection has to start small and feed on fascination. "You can't start by thinking about what's going to appeal to the mainstream," says Monello. "You have to ask, 'What's this narrow target market going to embrace and absolutely make its own?'"

To create that kind of bond, Campfire immerses itself in the unspoken etiquettes and motivations of different target communities--Internet anthropology with a commercial twist. Monello spent weeks before "Beta-7" loitering on gamer fan sites and message boards, learning the local language and culture. There he discovered, for example, that unfinished bootlegs of new games are highly prized among fans--so Campfire had Beta-7 send bootlegs to a few voices whom Monello had identified as leaders of the tribe. The seeds took: Those players uploaded screen shots to all the big gamer sites. "All of a sudden, this thing everyone thought was a marketing campaign bled into the real world," Monello remembers, "and that's when things started to get electric."

Contagion 2

Campfire's success with "Beta-7" opened the eyes of corporations to the stealthy potential of a viral campaign. And last year, Audi recruited the firm to draw wealthy young trendsetters to its new "compact luxury" A3. It's a particularly tough crowd, says Stephen Berkov, Audi's director of marketing. "As soon as this group feels targeted, they turn away." So Campfire jacked up the campaign's scope, depth, and complexity, working with McKinney-Silver (Audi's ad agency) to engineer an elaborate three-month cross-country scavenger-hunt-cum-whodunit to take place online and in the real world.

"The Art of the Heist" premise was that two agents were trying to prevent the largest art theft in history at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence; the master plans were embedded in SD memory cards planted in several A3s just in from Germany. The sleuths--actors playing the parts of Nisha and her partner/boyfriend, Ian--were requesting the help of the public in tracking down the SD cards. Unlike traditional product placement, where a product is jammed into a storyline, the A3 would become a central character.

One expert says, "These guys strategically hide parts of the story and motivate people to figure it out."

Where the Sega hoax had tapped into an already game-centric culture, this time Campfire faced a far more amorphous group. So during the final weekend of the New York International Auto Show, it "stole" the A3 on display and replaced it with a mysterious sign asking people to call a number if they had information on the theft. ("It's like, Who the hell could have stolen a car out of the Javits Center?!" Monello laughs.) When people did call, a voice mail told them to file any tips at an obscure Web address; there, they found a password-protected site, but clicking on "password" took them past a firewall, giving them the illusion of having hacked into the email system of the two field agents. Suddenly, they had access to hundreds of private emails and files, even Nisha and Ian's MP3s and personal photos--things that were peripheral to the narrative but gave it the texture of truth. "The next thing you know, you're 40 minutes into this and you're in way too deep to pull out," says Monello.