First off, I want to give kudos to the campaign team for really putting it out there to make word-of-mouth and guerilla tactics the focus of their efforts. It flies into the face of conventional wisdom and really goes head to head with more traditional promotional strategies of films like James Cameron's "Avatar".
I started by going to the link provided, leading me to Eventful.com's primary landing page for "Paranormal Activity" and it's "demand center". The first thing the app tried to do was determine my location, which it did, and ask me to confirm some basic information.
Unfortunately I had some immediate technical problems with buttons not working and had to try several times in order to get it to accept my selections. I'm using Firefox 3 on a PC, and throughout my experience on the site, I had CSS and other browser type issues that should have been easily caught, even in a budget-limited implementation.
The brief by iMedia also let me know that a significant part of the campaign was based on the Facebook fan page that had been setup, but there was nothing about this page on the Eventful link that led me to the main campaign component. In fact, most of the links from Eventful were MySpace related, including linking my Eventful profile to MySpace, with no option for Facebook at all.
The power of the movie stood on its own, and like any campaign, its purpose is to get the seed audience in place, and let word of mouth do the rest. It's apparent that this happened and it has been successful, but from a execution standpoint, even with a limited budget, it seems like they could have tied their pieces between their vendor (Eventful) and their foundational pieces (Facebook and MySpace) a little more together to leverage that power to an even greater degree.
-- Keith D. Pape, managing partner/CEO, andersson-pape Studios
The notion of exclusivity is a powerful lure. The notion of having to earn the right to have a movie in your hometown is really a clever idea. Paranormal, even. This campaign really gives horror fans a strong incentive to evangelize the movie to their social networks.
Over 80 percent of purchase decisions are influenced by word-of-mouth today (a rate that's probably even higher in the movie industry). This entire campaign is focused on energizing the "groundswell." So, yeah, I think this is smart.
The only comment I have is that I'd have loved to have seen a trailer close to the promotion. The community comments convinced me that other people were into this movie, but I still value my own opinion. If I could have reinforced my experience of checking out the campaign on Eventful with a hair-raising trailer, it would have sealed the deal for me.
-- Adam Kleinberg, CEO, Traction