Want to push your Snakes on a Plane? Get the bloggers in

By : David Crow

22/11/2006

‘Online advertising involving audiences creatively can be extrememly effective but firms need to be wary: relinquishing control can lead to damaging material'

At a time when the internet is more bottom-up than ever, with an explosion in content created by the consumers themselves, most online advertising campaigns remain strikingly top-down. Companies usually limit themselves to paying for ­website banners, or search based sponsored links, or corporate branding, so failing to harness material ­generated by web users.

There is another way, as demonstrated by Britain’s Ramp Industry, one of the few new-media companies to understand how to tap into to this powerful cultural trend. Ramp has built an innovative site for The Fountain, a film which opens in the US this month and in Britain in February.

Produced by Darren Aronofsky, a cult filmmaker, The Fountain is unlikely to be a blockbuster and its ­studios, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros, did not want to spend tens of millions on a promotional campaign for a movie without mass-market appeal. Instead, they asked Ramp Industry to develop a marketing strategy that would appeal directly to the niche fan base.

Ramp’s solution was a website – thefountainre­mixed.com – which lets audiences create their own promotional material using a selection of downloadable video clips, music tracks and title sequences.

Visitors to the innovative site use editing tools, ranging from basic software packages such as Apple’s iMovie to more sophisticated programs such as Final Cut Pro, to mould the music and clips into a film trailer which can be uploaded to the website. The hope is that consumers, proud of their achievements, will email their efforts to friends and relatives, and host the clips on their personal web spaces.

Ramp Industry can provide ­studios with instant statistics, including audience profiles, which allow development and alteration of strategy. This type of marketing aims to replace traditional, more costly, methods with digital word of mouth.

It has already notched up one spectacular success. Snakes on a Plane, a thriller which involves a domestic airliner being infested with snakes, managed to use a similar kind of promotion to become one of the summer’s biggest selling blockbusters.

During the film’s production, bloggers, intrigued by the suggestive title, began to speculate about its content. New Line, the studio, responded by encouraging the hype and invited the ever growing fan base to take part in designing the film’s merchandise and trailer.

Fearful that a critical drubbing would ruin their online success, the studio cancelled all press screenings and the film received very little ­coverage in the mainstream media. Nonetheless, Snakes on a Plane grossed $15.3m in its first weekend and topped the US box office – a remarkable achievement.

Film companies are not the only ones to appreciate the promise of online campaigns which collaborate with customers.

The Japanese car company Mazda last week announced it was suspending television commercials in Britain for the next six months. It has decided, instead, to more than double its digital media budget, from 5.5% of its total marketing spend to 12.5%, in an effort to appeal to its target audience of 25-to-45-year-old males.