Courting notoriety

‘Viral’ has become a buzz-word in our industry: it’s seen as magic bullet, a way of reaching millions of customers for a tiny investment. We’ve all seen the games that get emailed around offices, or been directed to the latest hilarious clip of an anthropomorphic kitten, but how many of us have ever bought something or changed our opinion on the strength of these visual nibbles? For a viral campaign to work it needs be innovative enough to warrant attention, be appropriate to the audience, and trigger the right reaction. Viewings numbers are just vanity; positive actions (booking tickets, joining mailing list, ordering widgets) is sanity.

‘Jack the Ripper and the East End’ is a temporary exhibition at London’s Museum in Docklands. We were already working with their team on a traditional, print-based marketing campaign when they asked if we could broaden the scope of the campaign by producing a ‘viral’. The visual campaign centres on a single, atmospheric image of a stack of newspapers; it is effective because it provides so many clues and cues to the nature of the exhibition. It’s not about cloaks and daggers; it’s not a theme park ride; it’s a fascinating exploration of London’s East End at a time of great social change and deprivation, when a serial killer gripped the public imagination and shone a light on innovations in journalism, forensics, policing and many other areas.

For the viral we tied in the newspaper theme by referencing the anonymous notes that were sent to the police claiming to be from the Ripper. We called the campaign ‘Jack’s Notorious Notes’, and our first act was to register the domain name www.jacksnotoriousnotes.com. As with all viral campaigns we knew that the idea had to be simple but engaging. The basic idea is that you receive an email from a friend that has the qualities of a Victorian ransom note. By clicking on a link you go to a video: a short film shows a stack of papers being cut up and made into an anonymous note; the note is folded and wax-sealed; it drops through a letterbox and the camera follows as the envelope is picked up, sliced open and the note is unfolded to reveal… your name and an invitation to visit the exhibition. You are then invited to repeat the process by creating your own note (using drag and drop slices of newsprint), registering your name and email address and then forwarding to friends. The pay-off is that by sending the note to three friends you receive a 20%-off voucher towards the ticket price.

It’s a simple idea but a complex task to deliver. Individually rendered video clips are linked via a sophisticated database containing your message and the details of you and your friends. We created the video and all of the graphics ourselves, but we had to call in a specialist development company to build the back-end systems. They used a new technology, Adobe’s Flex3, which combines with Flash to interrogate databases and deliver video in a fraction of the time of other systems. It has been great fun to work on and the feedback has been very positive from all sides. Ultimately it’s converting that feedback into sales that counts: up to the minute figures are that 227 out of the 20,000 visitors in the first five weeks came to the exhibition using the Notorious Notes offer. At just over 1% redemption, our client already regards the project as a success.