Viral marketing campaign from Banik communications hits a home run for Great Falls Voyagers Baseball Team

Social networks, blogs and viral videos have changed the face of communication as we knew it. Experts across the fields of marketing and Internet technology predict that social media is poised to explode even further in 2008.

While social media is a must for the likes of presidential candidates, and viral video campaigns have been utilized by big names in corporate advertising like Young & Rubicam and Ogilvy & Mather, it’s less likely to find a viral campaign promoting a local brand introduction in the hinterlands.

A successful introduction campaign is all about creating buzz…and Montana advertising agency Banik Communications http://www.banik.com/voyagers/index.html recently demonstrated that the Internet also has the potential to pinpoint that buzz. The northcentral Montana community was awhirl the first two weeks of the new year, as rumors circulated about UFO sightings and alien invasion. In two weeks, unique hits on the campaign’s teaser web site totaled 30,000—more than half the size of the town’s population—as visitors speculated about the UFO connection.

The creative team at Banik Communications took advantage of the social media potential in planning the launch of a new name for a minor league baseball team from the Great Falls White Sox to the Great Falls Voyagers http://www.greatfallsvoyagers.com/. In mid-November of 2007, the Great Falls Baseball Club Board members Rick Evans, Deb Ruggerie, Kerry Bronson, president Vinney Purpura and White Sox manager Jim Keough asked Banik Communications to develop a campaign to spark local interest. Since baseball club schedules come out early in the year, the announcement had to be made as soon as possible.

“The new logo itself inspired fun ideas right off the bat,” said Banik Creative Director Pat Doyle. “The web allows people to connect Great Falls with the 57-year old UFO sighting at the ball park that inspired the Voyager name—so we saw an ideal opportunity for a viral campaign.”

“The conceptual treatment of UFO sightings let us use a ‘homemade’ video look—which saved enormously on both time and production costs,” said Doyle. Eric Heidle and Dan Perbil, also Creative Directors at the Banik agency, shot video footage around Great Falls, then edited the footage in-house and added effects.

“The video is obviously faked, but we weren’t trying to fool anyone, just create a buzz of curiosity,” said Dan Perbil, the digital master behind the video effects. Television placement of two different 15-second “UFO sighting” spots began on December 31. The brief shots of shiny objects in the sky forming a “V” were uploaded to YouTube…and shortly began appearing in lot of blogs and MySpace pages. The seventeen Banik employees spread the video clip and web site out to their address lists with the subject line “Have you seen this?” Four dozen high school students were asked to wear “V” t-shirts with the date 1-15-08.

Billboards went up in four locations around Great Falls with the word “InVasion” and the web address to http://www.wemakecontact.com. Eric Heidle created the site, which was meant to be the unsophisticated handiwork of a man named Roy looking for others who had sighted UFOs. “Roy” updated the site half a dozen times, keeping up a running dialogue with visitors. “The bloggers out there were pretty sharp,” said Heidle. “One even caught the allusion to the lead character from the 1977 UFO movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

More than one marketing campaign has gone awry on the unpredictable shores and wide open sea of the web. Think of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey caught posting his own questions and answers on an online forum. Think of the Tahoe campaign that spawned viral videos criticizing the vehicle as a gas-guzzler. This medium, with all its powerful exposure, is controlled by the consumer, not the advertiser.

“A teaser campaign is especially tricky,” said Heidle. “There are bloggers out there who will track down the truth, and there goes your big reveal. You have to be very careful about the trail you leave and the deductions to be made from the clues that come with the technology. People love a mystery because they like to solve a puzzle—and things change very fast because the dialogue is 24/7.”

Visitors to the site and the bloggers that fueled the buzz tended to go along with the fun of the mystery. Each day brought new guesses as to what the “V” was all about. Heidle coded a series of hints into the http://www.wemakeccontact.com web site, which helped keep the public interactively engaged. “Jason” was the first to post a comment on http://www.greaterfalls.com that the campaign had to do with baseball–after almost two weeks of chatter about Christian Ministries, Verizon, Chili’s, a new regional airline, or a hockey team.

But you can’t simply let it fly; a successful Internet campaign has to be carefully monitored and tended—and sent out in various channels. “Blogs were an important part of the buzz,” said Randi Szabo, the Banik’s team leader in planning the campaign. “We could target local blogs to help ensure the audience our client was interested in,” she said. “A million downloads of the video from YouTube wouldn’t make a difference to our client; our target was the hometown fan.”

One of the puzzles Heidle built into the http://www.wemakecontact.com web site was a supposed audio recording, which could be decoded in a pattern of binary code that spelled a “V.” The most diligent of the bloggers, Great Falls resident Ron Grimshaw, worked hard to unravel the various encrypted messages and created his own web site about the UFO mystery.

The http://www.greaterfalls.com blog was the most active of the comment sites. Blogger David Sherman found the wemakecontact campaign effective use of media, and liked that “additional clues were given to give folks more to chew on, with updates on the web site giving credit to those who figured out some of the hints.” During the tease, site visits to http://www.greaterfalls.com “went through the roof,” Sherman said.

An interesting rebound of the Internet campaign came when one of the local television stations followed up their coverage of the team’s announcement with an in-depth story on the viral campaign itself. News director Gary Gunter at the Great Falls ABC affiliate said, “It was a coup to pull off something like that in a town this size—a campaign that was sophisticated creatively and technologically, with a high level of cool.”

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 48 percent of Internet users have visited video-sharing sites such as YouTube and the daily traffic to such sites on a typical day has doubled in the past year. Of the 70 percent of Americans who use the Internet, 40 percent read blogs regularly, nonprofit Pew’s founder, Lee Rainie says (http://www.pewinternet.org). The popularity of user-generated content such as Facebook and MySpace knows no bounds, and literally gives anywhere—and anywho—a global reach.

For the small businesses of America that are trying to figure out how they can get aboard the spiraling trend that has become mandatory for marketing success, it’s good to know that viral can also have the targeted accuracy and cost-effectiveness they need. All it takes is the same thing advertising success has always relied on: resourcefully creative thinking and an informed knowledge of the target market.