The Adpocalypse
Admageddon
Adicide
Adocaust
Adystopia
Adystopia
Survival kits-maps, stamps, phone credit, disposable cameras.
Shouldn't focus on how to survive the adpocalypse but how to prevent it? Or instil an imminent fear that it is coming so people decide they'd rather disable adblock?
Zombieland rules for surviving-
Orsen Wells War of the Worlds 1938
News bulletins suggesting the world was under an alien invasion. The following hours were a nightmare. The building was suddenly full of people and dark-blue uniforms. Hustled out of the studio, we were locked into a small back office on another floor. Here we sat incommunicado while network employees were busily collecting, destroying or locking up all scripts and records of the broadcast. Finally the Press was let loose upon us, ravening for horror. How many deaths had we heard of? (Implying they knew of thousands.) What did we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it was one of many.) What traffic deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.) The suicides? (Haven't you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?) It is all quite vague in my memory and quite terrible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio_drama)#Public_reaction
We could use this concept and start fake news broadcasts claiming the Apocalypse is coming...
People could be encouraged to take their online presence offline, by photo albums for your instagram pictures, get your friends addresses and numbers, learn how to send telegrams, buy VHS's for your favourite shows, vinyls/walkmans/CDs for your music, a diary for your ical, crack out the fax machine.
The more dramatic and dated/old fashioned the alternative the better. Exaggerate.
Channels-TV< radio, cinema (dramatic), newspaper^.
Marketing the Adpocalypse, similar style to The Blair Witch Project marketing campaign.
Prometheus
First there was the TED talk from the future. The short video showed Guy Pierce, as fictional Weyland Industries head Peter Weyland, giving a TED talk in 2023. The piece was first screened at the real TED conference in February. According to the LA Times TED organizers helped to make the film look like what they envision a TED talk will really be like in the future.
Now Fox has released a second video. This one is about David, a robot who understands human emotions that he does not feel, and who is creepily life like. Actor Michael Fassbender plays David in this short made to look like a corporate video about a cool new product.
there’s this website for Weyland Industries. The movie promo site could easily be mistaken for an actual corporate website. My favorite bit is the “about” section. It includes the standard corporate information like number of employees: 837.53 MILLION. Secondary locations: 160 countries and 63 colonies. There’s a corporate time line that includes facts such as in 2042 Weyland Industries donated $5 billion to Little Explorers, a charity “dedicated to the education of troubled middle school students.”
2012 Film
the Institute for Human Continuity, a fictional organization created to choose via lottery who survives the Mayan-predicted end times.
Marketing the Adpocalypse, similar style to The Blair Witch Project marketing campaign.
Three student filmmakers set out on a project to capture footage and prove the truth of the blair witch. However, the students go missing and their recorded footage is found 10 years later, which was supposedly the film used to make the movie. It is recorded with low quality cameras in first person, which adds to the effect that this was truly found footage. After success at the Sundance Film Festival, label Artisan Entertainment bought rights to the film and provided additional dollars for advertising. Here are the five key tactics used to bring about the unbelievable success of the Blair Witch:
(Photo from moviepilot.com)
Missing Person Leaflets
The main theme behind the Blair Witch Project’s marketing campaign was to establish uncertainly among the public. Every single tactic carried out revolved around stirring confusion among potential movie viewers. Was this really found footage? Were these people really dead? Is this all real or just a scam? No one could get to the bottom of it. Every piece of marketing worked to fuel this fire and interest audiences enough to not only view the film, but to talk about it with friends and challenge the concept of whether it was real, so more people would go see it. The first tactic focused on setting the stage. The Blair Witch team started by spreading rumors about the “student film makers.” They planted stories among the public, passed out missing person leaflets, shared photos from the police reports, and even went as far as having fake news stories written up by small local papers about the missing persons and their whereabouts. This word of mouth marketing was in-line with the key messages and kicked off the campaign.
Website
The website was the most instrumental component of the integrated marketing campaign. All forms of marketing and calls to actions drove audiences to the site. This was 1999, so website surfing was still fairly new to many consumers. The Blair Witch site 
was very simple and capitalized off the low-budget and homemade concept. It really looked like students put it together. The site was an extension of the storyline, describing in detail, the myth of the blair witch and giving more biographical information on the missing filmmakers. It didn’t “sell” to get users to go see the movie but instead focused on the myth to confuse and scare potential viewers. People saw the movie on their own. The campaign benefitted from two important factors: limitation and timing. The web was a relatively new platform then. But the producers kept adding content over time, adding witchy stories and footage the directors had obtained during filming. And this being a time when the internet was a discovery phase among consumers, it was the perfect moment to capitalize on free publicity via the medium. Although the site was updated a few years ago to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the movie, most of the site resembles the original look and feel. Take a look: blairwitch.com.
was very simple and capitalized off the low-budget and homemade concept. It really looked like students put it together. The site was an extension of the storyline, describing in detail, the myth of the blair witch and giving more biographical information on the missing filmmakers. It didn’t “sell” to get users to go see the movie but instead focused on the myth to confuse and scare potential viewers. People saw the movie on their own. The campaign benefitted from two important factors: limitation and timing. The web was a relatively new platform then. But the producers kept adding content over time, adding witchy stories and footage the directors had obtained during filming. And this being a time when the internet was a discovery phase among consumers, it was the perfect moment to capitalize on free publicity via the medium. Although the site was updated a few years ago to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the movie, most of the site resembles the original look and feel. Take a look: blairwitch.com.Message Boards and Chat Rooms
Think back to 1999. If you had the internet, chances are, you were using AOL and were probably frequenting chat rooms and other online forums. These foundations for what would later become wikis, blogs and social media sites, were where people gossiped, communicated and shared information. The marketers for the Blair Witch knew this and planted seeds in these online rooms about the film. It was an ultra-grassroots move – but in the digital age. They shared the missing person photos and directed visitors to the website. They pretended to be typical online users and stirred up questions about the validity of the film, intriguing fellow chatters. They even manipulated the IMDb records so if you looked up the actors on the site, their bio information listed them as missing and presumed dead! The rumors continued to fly and people became both confused and captivated with the story.
Documentary and Trailer
The trailer was simple. It gave viewers peeks of film but left the rest up to the viewer’s imagination. What’s more important here is that it was not shown in mainstream media outlets, continuing to emphasize the low-budget, low-quality nature of the film. They wanted viewers to think they stumbled across something unknown and share that news with friends. Additionally, through a partnership with the Sci-Fi channel, a mini documentary on the blair witch was put together to demonstrate the realness of the storyline. Even the movie label which purchased the film stayed on track with the campaign’s theme. Artisan refused to advertise the film conventionally and instead showed footage in colleges and niche settings. The teasers featured brief, low-fi trailers with only snippets of footage, along with the Blair Witch website address. Here is the video for the original trailer:
Magazine Ad
Finally, after opening weekend, the marketing team took out a full page ad in Variety Magazine, a well-known trade publication for the entertainment industry. But the approach was far from traditional. Instead of touting the flick’s impressive opening gross numbers, the copy read: “blairwitch.com: 21,222,589 hits to date.” And with that, Hollywood was introduced to the power of the Web. The ad was in a traditional space but the copy was raw and simple, just like everything about the film, to continue driving people to the website. Plus, the ad focused on the website’s success rather than the film. 21 million hits just after opening weekend. Keep in mind the time period. In early 1999, the internet was only being used regularly by about 190 million users (from Internet Live Stats). That means more than 11% of all internet users visited this single movie website!
Okay, so you’re probably waiting for me to mention ROI. Here goes…
Produced on a shoestring budget of around $25,000, the movie went on to earn almost 10,000 times that amount ($250 million)! It’s the sixth highest grossing independent film, and is the second most successful film of all time in terms of profit. In fact, it only trails behind Paranormal Activity in that category, which actually modeled its “home video” style filming after the Blair Witch Project. Although it no longer holds the top spot today, it does carry a legacy as the first successful venture to use internet marketing, online buzz and virility. It’s undoubtedly one of the greatest marketing campaigns in our history and the granddaddy of (successful) home video style filming.
ORPrometheus
First there was the TED talk from the future. The short video showed Guy Pierce, as fictional Weyland Industries head Peter Weyland, giving a TED talk in 2023. The piece was first screened at the real TED conference in February. According to the LA Times TED organizers helped to make the film look like what they envision a TED talk will really be like in the future.
2012 Film
the Institute for Human Continuity, a fictional organization created to choose via lottery who survives the Mayan-predicted end times.
Sony have expanded the online world of the film, adding more content to the IHC and launching two additional sites (This Is the End and Farewell Atlantis, the latter promoting a novel written by John Cusack’s nice-guy-just-trying-to-save-his-kids character). They’ve also been making heavy use of YouTube to release videos.
The IHC YouTube channel is posting video responses to questions asked on webcams by “vloggers” — the vloggers are plants, but some effort was put into creating fake youtube accounts for them.
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