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By_Danielle SacksPhotographs By_Peter Rad
互联网不再是另外一个世界，前沿的创意人员正在试图通过虚拟的人物、故事和事件来营销真实世界中的产品，也许在不远的将来，真实和虚拟将融为一体。
He woke up in a pool of sweat, with bruises on his arms, his ankle badly swollen. He’d had another terrifying blackout, the kind he’d been experiencing ever since he began beta-testing Sega’s soon-to-be-released ESPN NFL football 2k4 video game. Now his neighbor was banging on his front door: “My wife’s been crying all night! Why don’t you try a move like that with me, tough guy??One more innocent victim. No doubt he’d attacked her, too, like an animal going in for the kill. Beta-7, as the twenty something man came to be known, could find no explanation for his horrifying behavior, unless the Sega game was somehow torquing his brain. And so Beta-7 began his desperate attempt to prevent the game’s release and expose the company’s conspiracy and lies. As he searched for a reason for his sudden violent surges - his compulsion to tackle perfect strangers - he found himself tracing a labyrinthine trail of evidence. He hacked into a Web site that contained medical records of twisted experiments performed on fellow gamers. He found and reconstructed shredded Sega memos that admitted the game should not be released. He even unearthed video outtakes of spokesman Warren Sapp insisting that the game would not cause violence in its players. Beta-7 spent three months searching for answers, answers that never arrived. A week after Sega released the game, Beta-7 - along with his computer and Xbox - disappeared, leaving behind only a few photographs of his ransacked apartment, uploaded to his blog by a distraught friend.
除了喜欢网络生活和略有些迷恋电子游戏，Beta-7，这个20出头的阳光男孩和其他同龄的年轻人没有什么不同，不过当他开始试用和测试一款最新的电子游戏时，一切都发生了变化。 他常发现自己在醒来时大汗淋漓，浑身充满伤痕，还常常发生昏厥现象，罪魁祸首是一款电子游戏——世嘉公司最新研发并即将上市的国家橄榄球联盟比赛（NFL）游戏。Beta-7决心将这款游戏的秘密公之于众，他展开了一系列的调查，甚至还将公司碎纸机中关于该产品不利于玩家的会议记录重新整理出来，但是就在这时，Beta-7发生了意外。他失踪了，他的公寓一片狼藉，显然被人翻遍了， 他的朋友把照片上传将消息放到了互联网上。
It’s a dark and disturbing tale. And, of course, it’s utterly bogus, a fiction engineered in a strip mall in Orlando. There, surrounded by tiki mugs and other high kitsch, Mike Monello, a hefty 37-year-old with bulbous hazel eyes, and Jim Gunshanan, a local writer he’d hired to play Beta-7 day and night, lived the charade in real-time for 9 days. The elaborate 23 stunt was a viral marketing campaign dreamed up at Monello’s postmodern production shop, now called Campfire, and ESPN’s ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, to help their client mount a challenge to Electronic Arts’ Madden NFL, the most popular sports video game on the market. By creating a pseudo-controversy among gamers about the new Sega release, they figured, they might be able to carve off a little name recognition and jump-start sales.
也许你会关心：Beta-7被找到了吗？感谢上帝，这完全是一个编造出来的故事—一个火营（CAMPFIR）工作室和ESPN的广告代理公司共同策划的市场营销活动。他们称之为病毒式营销。通过制造虚拟的来自玩家的反对声音，达到引起受众注意和购买的欲望。
Monello and his partners at Campfire, Gregg Hale and Steve Wax, have become the high-wire stuntmen of viral marketing. In the past few years, the tiny outfit with offices in Orlando and New York has been the invisible force behind the country’s most groundbreaking viral campaigns - nonlinear, interactive advertising that starts out niche and then metastasizes. Besides “Beta-7,”their work includes Audi’s “The Art of the Heist,” as well as campaigns for Levi’s, Sharp, Hewlett-Packard, and MSN. And now the Campfire trio is trying to spread a bug for its latest client, Pontiac.
Monello 及他的合作伙伴Gregg Hale 和Steve Wax善于运用病毒式营销方式通过互联网等电子媒介将产品迅速被市场获知并接受。奥迪A3失窃案活动就是他们的杰作，他们的客户名单还包括李维牛仔裤、夏普、惠普和MSN。
These days, creating a successful viral campaign - that addictive, self-propagating advertainment that lives on Web sites, blogs, cell phones, message boards, and even in real-world stunts - is the dream of every marketer and ad shop. It’s a way to reach an ad-allergic audience and get it not only to notice your brand but to physically interact with it, to live it. Cracking the viral code is no small feat, though. JupiterResearch recently reported that while marketers are increasingly trying to insinuate themselves into social media like blogs and MySpace, 69% of users are skeptical. And as willing as consumers may be to suspend disbelief for a compelling fiction such as “Beta-7,”they’ll turn on you in a heartbeat. “The bottom line is that viral marketing is so not trusted by people that marketers can go a long way toward making people hate your guts if [they] don’t do it right,” says Lee Ann Daly, ESPN’s former executive vice president of marketing. Or as Hale puts it, black socks under his black Velcro sandals: “Viral is the opposite of brute force. The more brute force you try to use, the less viral it becomes, because people don’t want to pass on pure marketing messages.”
病毒式营销方式不但能让品牌受到关注，还能让受众和产品发生联系，这是病毒式营销的价值所在。Jupiter调研公司的数据显示，69%的人对发布在博客和MySpace上的广告持怀疑态度。因此病毒式营销更加关注找到正确的方式。“关键是不能用蛮力向受众去推产品，你越用力，病毒的营销作用就越小，因为没有人愿意去传播没有任何意义的产品信息。”ESPN前营销执行副总裁Lee Ann Daly说。
So what’s the trick? Obsession, Observation, Overkill. Creating a viral campaign isn’t like filming a 3
-second spot and then sitting back and letting it run. It’s a marathon, one that takes mastery of numerous media and the creativity to spin out a form of open-ended, multilayered, living entertainment that will keep an audience engaged for as long as possible. On the Sega campaign, which Monello compares to “a three-month-long Saturday Night Live skit,” the team began by writing months’s worth of backlogged blog entries to give Beta-7 a history. When it decided to create the medical Web site, it researched how video games might affect the brain - and had an art director scribble the doctors’ notes - so the documents would look legit. It even taped ambush video of the game’s real programmers denying Beta-7’s charges.
全身心投入、仔细观察以及集中全力轰炸被Monello认为是使病毒式营销获得成功的关键。这可不是一个3秒的广告，而是一场马拉松。它需要将多媒体形态和创造力融为一体，创造出一种开放式的、多角度的和娱乐的氛围才能把受众的注意力长时间地吸引住。
As all of this pseudo-content made its way online, the dance grew even more complex. At one point when the team thought the tension on the message boards was dissipating, it created Gamer Chuck, a character playing the role of a Sega employee trying to pass himself off as a hip gamer. As Chuck trashed Beta-7 and his conspiracy theories on his Web site, the boards went wild. Everyone who had been leery of Beta-7 - suspecting that he was a marketing tool - started bashing his new nemesis, who was clearly a corporate Trojan horse. “It got pretty meta,” Monello chuckles, “but as soon as the site launched, it worked.”
火营团队时刻注意控制活动发展的状态，当消息逐渐扩散时，他们又创造了Gamer Chuck这个人物。Gamer来自世嘉公司，想把自己伪装成游戏的高手。逐渐地，每一个对Beta-7有怀疑或感兴趣的人都成了公司的营销工具。
“Beta-7” ultimately clocked some 2.2 million followers and, for $300,000 (excluding TV spots), helped Sega top sales projections by 25% in a category overwhelmingly dominated by Madden. Along the way, however, Campfire had done something else: It proved that a young, cynical, media-saturated audience just might be willing to listen to marketers as long as they showed some respect. “The virtue of their work,” says ESPN’s Daly, “is that if you’re on the side of the equation that believes [the hoax], then it’s fascinating, and if you’re on the side that gets that it’s not real, then it’s just great entertainment.”
最终 Beta-7吸引了22万人的关注，并在运动类游戏市场中占据了25%的分额，而整个运动仅仅花费了3万美元。
In other words, Campfire expands its audience by drawing in the gullible, the curious, and the merely bored - simultaneously. According to Chip Heath, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s B-school and author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Random House, January 2007), that’s the same broad appeal that pulls people into tabloid gossip or urban myths. Campfire’s work, he says, capitalizes on the “curiosity gap,” a term coined in the 199
s by George Loewenstein, a Carnegie Mellon academic who studied the psychology of curiosity, and which refers to the addictive pull people experience when their preconceived ideas are challenged. For the gap to work, though, the audience needs enough backstory and a sufficient flow of detail to keep it guessing. Campfire maintains this tension by creating ever more gaps and, crucially, never sliding into low-grade fictions.
火营始终调动着受众的好奇心并很少让他们感到厌烦。按斯坦福商学院的组织行为学教授Chip Heath的话讲，他们很好地填充了人们的好奇心缺口，和人们津津乐道的花边新闻一样，它们通过对人们惯常的想法提出挑战而让人们上瘾。
It’s easy to get people curious, Heath points out, and it’s keeping them that way that’s the challenge. “I think that’s where companies fall prey,” he says. “We see a lot of people trying to use the same curiosity-gap technique, but then not delivering value or entertainment. It’s like when someone tells you a bad punch line [to a joke]. You’re kind of irritated because they haven’t delivered on the anticipation and expectation they set up.”
As it happens, Hale and Monello know about entertainment and audience building. They got their initiation with none other than The Blair Witch Project, the lost-in-the-woods horror flick that they, along with three other partners, made for $22,000 and parlayed into a $248 million take at the box office in 1999, an indie-film record. Hale and Monello talk about Blair as if it were a school they attended, and in a sense it was. In making it, they essentially broke all the rules of filmmaking and marketing: They used no-name actors, no script, and in 1998, a year before the film was released (or was even purchased by its distributor, Artisan), they inadvertently took their marketing . . . online.
Hale 和 Monello最初的灵感和经验来自于他们制作的电影《布莱尔女巫》，这部成本仅为2.2万美元的小成本影片的票房达到了2.48亿美元。由于成本限制，他们没有使用有名气的演员和好剧本，但成功的关键在于，他们无意中使用了网络作为营销的工具。
At a time when Web sites and message boards were a tiny part of the publicity machine, the Blair crew created both for a group of film geeks who’d heard about the film’s “truth or myth?” premise on a 1998 Bravo special. The filmmakers channeled all their attention to this tiny fan base and soon noticed that whenever they engaged somebody one-on-one, or fed them new elements of the Blair mythology (pages from the missing students’ diaries, say, or interviews with local police, all created ad hoc), the discussion board exploded. “When it started to die down,” Monello recalls, “we’d look at each other and go, ‘what are we going to do to pump it up?’”
当时的网络还不是很普及，但他们发现由于一小撮人的强烈兴趣，使影片的信息被迅速传播开来。
What they did was tease out the story further and further, creating an ever more elaborate warren of “rabbit holes,” or seductive entry points into the narrative. To prime the palates of the conspiracy junkies, a month before the film premiered, they cut a deal with the Sci Fi channel to run a one-hour pseudo-documentary about the Blair myth, which, like Bravo’s special, played the story straight. Even the film’s trailers were designed to intrigue, not to explain: They ran for under a minute with only a black screen, grinding noises, the protagonist’s terrified monologue, and the film’s URL.
在影片播出之前，他们还在Sci Fi电视台上播放一个小时的关于布莱尔秘密的资料片—当然也都是虚拟的。同样，片花的设计目的是激起人们的好奇心而不是仅仅说明电影。
Stanford’s Heath says such piecemeal storytelling is completely counterintuitive to traditional marketers, whose instincts are to tell stories as efficiently as possible, to reveal everything they know about a topic at once (“the curse of knowledge,” he calls it). By contrast, Heath explains, “what these guys are doing is strategically hiding parts of the story in an interesting and entertaining way, and getting people motivated to figure it out for themselves.” Soon enough, an obscure geek obsession with Blair spilled onto larger fan sites. Deejays started discussing the “legend” on drive-time radio. Then Artisan picked up Blair, re-created the grassroots buzz machine on a mass scale, and the rest is movie history.
对于传统的营销人员来说，他们讲故事的方式是尽可能地将故事的来龙去脉给受众讲清楚，而病毒式营销的做法是把故事中最有趣和娱乐的部分隐藏起来让受众自己去寻找。
The Blair experience taught Hale and Monello that the Internet wasn’t just another advertising billboard (a lesson Artisan failed to retain in churning out Blair Witch II, a sexed-up, formulaic bomb). Because the Web can knit together numerous media platforms, and because it allows a story to unfold in real time, they recognized it as a new extension of the entertainment experience. As Ty Montague, chief creative officer at JWT, who hired the team for the “Beta-7” campaign in 2003, puts it: “They were the first ones to really embrace a story that arced across multiple mediums and all came together. It was a seminal moment in communications.”
布莱尔女巫的成功使Hale 和 Monello认识到互联网不只是一个发布广告的平台，它能给用户带来真正的娱乐体验。正如JWT公司的首席创意师Ty Montague 说的："他们（Hale 和 Monello）是最先将一个故事用多种媒介手法展现出来的人，这可以被看做是传播领域的重大时刻。"
As Campfire perfected that mode of storytelling on “Beta-7,” the team realized something else: The virus they discovered on Blair catches on only if it forges a community where none existed. The infection has to start small and feed on fascination. “You can’t start by thinking about what’s going to appeal to the mainstream,” says Monello. “You have to ask, ‘what’s this narrow target market going to embrace and absolutely make its own?’”
当Beta-7事件大获成功的同时，火营团队也注意到其中的诀窍：即你不能从一开始就想着去引起主流人群的注意，而是要找到最关键的窄众。
To create that kind of bond, Campfire immerses itself in the unspoken etiquettes and motivations of different target communities - Internet anthropology with a commercial twist. Monello spent weeks before “Beta-7” loitering on gamer fan sites and message boards, learning the local language and culture. There he discovered, for example, that unfinished bootlegs of new games are highly prized among fans - so Campfire had Beta-7 send bootlegs to a few voices whom Monello had identified as leaders of the tribe. The seeds took: Those players uploaded screen shots to all the big gamer sites. “All of a sudden, this thing everyone thought was a marketing campaign bled into the real world,” Monello remembers, “and that’s when things started to get electric.”
为了找到这些传播病毒的种子，Monello在玩家常去的网站和BBS上泡了数周的时间，学习他们习惯的语言和文化。Monello发现，那些尚未完成的或测试版的新游戏非常受欢迎，于是他让Beta-7这个虚拟人物把游戏测试版发给了那些引导潮流的意见领袖，结果大获成功。
Yes, it is a treacherous world for marketers-and getting worse. Suspicious consumers are now making the job even harder by flooding the Web with their own content. As Jess Greenwood, a writer at Contagious, a British magazine that tracks viral campaigns, points out, “You’re trying to insert a viral video, but you’re competing with homemade films of kids putting Mentos in a Diet Coke bottle.” Talk about authentic entertainment.Worse, as this meta-marketing niche gets more crowded, the very word is losing its meaning: Marketers now proclaim their campaigns “viral” before they’ve even been released. Proving once again that if there’s a way to miss the point, they’ll find it.
不过也有坏消息，对于营销人员来说，他们面对的世界正在变得愈加危险。越来越多由消费者自己生产的内容充斥在网络上，这给想要通过病毒式营销来进行传播的营销人员带来很大威胁。还有些营销人员在病毒还没有扩散时，就误认为自己成功了。错误是不可避免的，关键是如何达到成功。
Language Tips
Bruise擦伤
Innocent 单纯的
Conspiracy 阴谋
Utterly 完全
Bogus 假的
Dissipate 扩散
Pseudo 假的
Leery 不信任的
Treacherous 危险的
Intrigue 引起兴趣
Puppet 木偶、布偶的拉绳者
Shred 撕成碎片的
Labyrinthine 错综复杂，难以理解的事物
互联网不再是另外一个世界，前沿的创意人员正在试图通过虚拟的人物、故事和事件来营销真实世界中的产品，也许在不远的将来，真实和虚拟将融为一体。
He woke up in a pool of sweat, with bruises on his arms, his ankle badly swollen. He’d had another terrifying blackout, the kind he’d been experiencing ever since he began beta-testing Sega’s soon-to-be-released ESPN NFL football 2k4 video game. Now his neighbor was banging on his front door: “My wife’s been crying all night! Why don’t you try a move like that with me, tough guy??One more innocent victim. No doubt he’d attacked her, too, like an animal going in for the kill. Beta-7, as the twenty something man came to be known, could find no explanation for his horrifying behavior, unless the Sega game was somehow torquing his brain. And so Beta-7 began his desperate attempt to prevent the game’s release and expose the company’s conspiracy and lies. As he searched for a reason for his sudden violent surges - his compulsion to tackle perfect strangers - he found himself tracing a labyrinthine trail of evidence. He hacked into a Web site that contained medical records of twisted experiments performed on fellow gamers. He found and reconstructed shredded Sega memos that admitted the game should not be released. He even unearthed video outtakes of spokesman Warren Sapp insisting that the game would not cause violence in its players. Beta-7 spent three months searching for answers, answers that never arrived. A week after Sega released the game, Beta-7 - along with his computer and Xbox - disappeared, leaving behind only a few photographs of his ransacked apartment, uploaded to his blog by a distraught friend.
除了喜欢网络生活和略有些迷恋电子游戏，Beta-7，这个20出头的阳光男孩和其他同龄的年轻人没有什么不同，不过当他开始试用和测试一款最新的电子游戏时，一切都发生了变化。 他常发现自己在醒来时大汗淋漓，浑身充满伤痕，还常常发生昏厥现象，罪魁祸首是一款电子游戏——世嘉公司最新研发并即将上市的国家橄榄球联盟比赛（NFL）游戏。Beta-7决心将这款游戏的秘密公之于众，他展开了一系列的调查，甚至还将公司碎纸机中关于该产品不利于玩家的会议记录重新整理出来，但是就在这时，Beta-7发生了意外。他失踪了，他的公寓一片狼藉，显然被人翻遍了， 他的朋友把照片上传将消息放到了互联网上。
It’s a dark and disturbing tale. And, of course, it’s utterly bogus, a fiction engineered in a strip mall in Orlando. There, surrounded by tiki mugs and other high kitsch, Mike Monello, a hefty 37-year-old with bulbous hazel eyes, and Jim Gunshanan, a local writer he’d hired to play Beta-7 day and night, lived the charade in real-time for 9 days. The elaborate 23 stunt was a viral marketing campaign dreamed up at Monello’s postmodern production shop, now called Campfire, and ESPN’s ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, to help their client mount a challenge to Electronic Arts’ Madden NFL, the most popular sports video game on the market. By creating a pseudo-controversy among gamers about the new Sega release, they figured, they might be able to carve off a little name recognition and jump-start sales.
也许你会关心：Beta-7被找到了吗？感谢上帝，这完全是一个编造出来的故事—一个火营（CAMPFIR）工作室和ESPN的广告代理公司共同策划的市场营销活动。他们称之为病毒式营销。通过制造虚拟的来自玩家的反对声音，达到引起受众注意和购买的欲望。
Monello and his partners at Campfire, Gregg Hale and Steve Wax, have become the high-wire stuntmen of viral marketing. In the past few years, the tiny outfit with offices in Orlando and New York has been the invisible force behind the country’s most groundbreaking viral campaigns - nonlinear, interactive advertising that starts out niche and then metastasizes. Besides “Beta-7,”their work includes Audi’s “The Art of the Heist,” as well as campaigns for Levi’s, Sharp, Hewlett-Packard, and MSN. And now the Campfire trio is trying to spread a bug for its latest client, Pontiac.
Monello 及他的合作伙伴Gregg Hale 和Steve Wax善于运用病毒式营销方式通过互联网等电子媒介将产品迅速被市场获知并接受。奥迪A3失窃案活动就是他们的杰作，他们的客户名单还包括李维牛仔裤、夏普、惠普和MSN。
These days, creating a successful viral campaign - that addictive, self-propagating advertainment that lives on Web sites, blogs, cell phones, message boards, and even in real-world stunts - is the dream of every marketer and ad shop. It’s a way to reach an ad-allergic audience and get it not only to notice your brand but to physically interact with it, to live it. Cracking the viral code is no small feat, though. JupiterResearch recently reported that while marketers are increasingly trying to insinuate themselves into social media like blogs and MySpace, 69% of users are skeptical. And as willing as consumers may be to suspend disbelief for a compelling fiction such as “Beta-7,”they’ll turn on you in a heartbeat. “The bottom line is that viral marketing is so not trusted by people that marketers can go a long way toward making people hate your guts if [they] don’t do it right,” says Lee Ann Daly, ESPN’s former executive vice president of marketing. Or as Hale puts it, black socks under his black Velcro sandals: “Viral is the opposite of brute force. The more brute force you try to use, the less viral it becomes, because people don’t want to pass on pure marketing messages.”
病毒式营销方式不但能让品牌受到关注，还能让受众和产品发生联系，这是病毒式营销的价值所在。Jupiter调研公司的数据显示，69%的人对发布在博客和MySpace上的广告持怀疑态度。因此病毒式营销更加关注找到正确的方式。“关键是不能用蛮力向受众去推产品，你越用力，病毒的营销作用就越小，因为没有人愿意去传播没有任何意义的产品信息。”ESPN前营销执行副总裁Lee Ann Daly说。
So what’s the trick? Obsession, Observation, Overkill. Creating a viral campaign isn’t like filming a 3
-second spot and then sitting back and letting it run. It’s a marathon, one that takes mastery of numerous media and the creativity to spin out a form of open-ended, multilayered, living entertainment that will keep an audience engaged for as long as possible. On the Sega campaign, which Monello compares to “a three-month-long Saturday Night Live skit,” the team began by writing months’s worth of backlogged blog entries to give Beta-7 a history. When it decided to create the medical Web site, it researched how video games might affect the brain - and had an art director scribble the doctors’ notes - so the documents would look legit. It even taped ambush video of the game’s real programmers denying Beta-7’s charges.
全身心投入、仔细观察以及集中全力轰炸被Monello认为是使病毒式营销获得成功的关键。这可不是一个3秒的广告，而是一场马拉松。它需要将多媒体形态和创造力融为一体，创造出一种开放式的、多角度的和娱乐的氛围才能把受众的注意力长时间地吸引住。
As all of this pseudo-content made its way online, the dance grew even more complex. At one point when the team thought the tension on the message boards was dissipating, it created Gamer Chuck, a character playing the role of a Sega employee trying to pass himself off as a hip gamer. As Chuck trashed Beta-7 and his conspiracy theories on his Web site, the boards went wild. Everyone who had been leery of Beta-7 - suspecting that he was a marketing tool - started bashing his new nemesis, who was clearly a corporate Trojan horse. “It got pretty meta,” Monello chuckles, “but as soon as the site launched, it worked.”
火营团队时刻注意控制活动发展的状态，当消息逐渐扩散时，他们又创造了Gamer Chuck这个人物。Gamer来自世嘉公司，想把自己伪装成游戏的高手。逐渐地，每一个对Beta-7有怀疑或感兴趣的人都成了公司的营销工具。
“Beta-7” ultimately clocked some 2.2 million followers and, for $300,000 (excluding TV spots), helped Sega top sales projections by 25% in a category overwhelmingly dominated by Madden. Along the way, however, Campfire had done something else: It proved that a young, cynical, media-saturated audience just might be willing to listen to marketers as long as they showed some respect. “The virtue of their work,” says ESPN’s Daly, “is that if you’re on the side of the equation that believes [the hoax], then it’s fascinating, and if you’re on the side that gets that it’s not real, then it’s just great entertainment.”
最终 Beta-7吸引了22万人的关注，并在运动类游戏市场中占据了25%的分额，而整个运动仅仅花费了3万美元。
In other words, Campfire expands its audience by drawing in the gullible, the curious, and the merely bored - simultaneously. According to Chip Heath, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s B-school and author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Random House, January 2007), that’s the same broad appeal that pulls people into tabloid gossip or urban myths. Campfire’s work, he says, capitalizes on the “curiosity gap,” a term coined in the 199
s by George Loewenstein, a Carnegie Mellon academic who studied the psychology of curiosity, and which refers to the addictive pull people experience when their preconceived ideas are challenged. For the gap to work, though, the audience needs enough backstory and a sufficient flow of detail to keep it guessing. Campfire maintains this tension by creating ever more gaps and, crucially, never sliding into low-grade fictions.
火营始终调动着受众的好奇心并很少让他们感到厌烦。按斯坦福商学院的组织行为学教授Chip Heath的话讲，他们很好地填充了人们的好奇心缺口，和人们津津乐道的花边新闻一样，它们通过对人们惯常的想法提出挑战而让人们上瘾。
It’s easy to get people curious, Heath points out, and it’s keeping them that way that’s the challenge. “I think that’s where companies fall prey,” he says. “We see a lot of people trying to use the same curiosity-gap technique, but then not delivering value or entertainment. It’s like when someone tells you a bad punch line [to a joke]. You’re kind of irritated because they haven’t delivered on the anticipation and expectation they set up.”
As it happens, Hale and Monello know about entertainment and audience building. They got their initiation with none other than The Blair Witch Project, the lost-in-the-woods horror flick that they, along with three other partners, made for $22,000 and parlayed into a $248 million take at the box office in 1999, an indie-film record. Hale and Monello talk about Blair as if it were a school they attended, and in a sense it was. In making it, they essentially broke all the rules of filmmaking and marketing: They used no-name actors, no script, and in 1998, a year before the film was released (or was even purchased by its distributor, Artisan), they inadvertently took their marketing . . . online.
Hale 和 Monello最初的灵感和经验来自于他们制作的电影《布莱尔女巫》，这部成本仅为2.2万美元的小成本影片的票房达到了2.48亿美元。由于成本限制，他们没有使用有名气的演员和好剧本，但成功的关键在于，他们无意中使用了网络作为营销的工具。
At a time when Web sites and message boards were a tiny part of the publicity machine, the Blair crew created both for a group of film geeks who’d heard about the film’s “truth or myth?” premise on a 1998 Bravo special. The filmmakers channeled all their attention to this tiny fan base and soon noticed that whenever they engaged somebody one-on-one, or fed them new elements of the Blair mythology (pages from the missing students’ diaries, say, or interviews with local police, all created ad hoc), the discussion board exploded. “When it started to die down,” Monello recalls, “we’d look at each other and go, ‘what are we going to do to pump it up?’”
当时的网络还不是很普及，但他们发现由于一小撮人的强烈兴趣，使影片的信息被迅速传播开来。
What they did was tease out the story further and further, creating an ever more elaborate warren of “rabbit holes,” or seductive entry points into the narrative. To prime the palates of the conspiracy junkies, a month before the film premiered, they cut a deal with the Sci Fi channel to run a one-hour pseudo-documentary about the Blair myth, which, like Bravo’s special, played the story straight. Even the film’s trailers were designed to intrigue, not to explain: They ran for under a minute with only a black screen, grinding noises, the protagonist’s terrified monologue, and the film’s URL.
在影片播出之前，他们还在Sci Fi电视台上播放一个小时的关于布莱尔秘密的资料片—当然也都是虚拟的。同样，片花的设计目的是激起人们的好奇心而不是仅仅说明电影。
Stanford’s Heath says such piecemeal storytelling is completely counterintuitive to traditional marketers, whose instincts are to tell stories as efficiently as possible, to reveal everything they know about a topic at once (“the curse of knowledge,” he calls it). By contrast, Heath explains, “what these guys are doing is strategically hiding parts of the story in an interesting and entertaining way, and getting people motivated to figure it out for themselves.” Soon enough, an obscure geek obsession with Blair spilled onto larger fan sites. Deejays started discussing the “legend” on drive-time radio. Then Artisan picked up Blair, re-created the grassroots buzz machine on a mass scale, and the rest is movie history.
对于传统的营销人员来说，他们讲故事的方式是尽可能地将故事的来龙去脉给受众讲清楚，而病毒式营销的做法是把故事中最有趣和娱乐的部分隐藏起来让受众自己去寻找。
The Blair experience taught Hale and Monello that the Internet wasn’t just another advertising billboard (a lesson Artisan failed to retain in churning out Blair Witch II, a sexed-up, formulaic bomb). Because the Web can knit together numerous media platforms, and because it allows a story to unfold in real time, they recognized it as a new extension of the entertainment experience. As Ty Montague, chief creative officer at JWT, who hired the team for the “Beta-7” campaign in 2003, puts it: “They were the first ones to really embrace a story that arced across multiple mediums and all came together. It was a seminal moment in communications.”
布莱尔女巫的成功使Hale 和 Monello认识到互联网不只是一个发布广告的平台，它能给用户带来真正的娱乐体验。正如JWT公司的首席创意师Ty Montague 说的："他们（Hale 和 Monello）是最先将一个故事用多种媒介手法展现出来的人，这可以被看做是传播领域的重大时刻。"
As Campfire perfected that mode of storytelling on “Beta-7,” the team realized something else: The virus they discovered on Blair catches on only if it forges a community where none existed. The infection has to start small and feed on fascination. “You can’t start by thinking about what’s going to appeal to the mainstream,” says Monello. “You have to ask, ‘what’s this narrow target market going to embrace and absolutely make its own?’”
当Beta-7事件大获成功的同时，火营团队也注意到其中的诀窍：即你不能从一开始就想着去引起主流人群的注意，而是要找到最关键的窄众。
To create that kind of bond, Campfire immerses itself in the unspoken etiquettes and motivations of different target communities - Internet anthropology with a commercial twist. Monello spent weeks before “Beta-7” loitering on gamer fan sites and message boards, learning the local language and culture. There he discovered, for example, that unfinished bootlegs of new games are highly prized among fans - so Campfire had Beta-7 send bootlegs to a few voices whom Monello had identified as leaders of the tribe. The seeds took: Those players uploaded screen shots to all the big gamer sites. “All of a sudden, this thing everyone thought was a marketing campaign bled into the real world,” Monello remembers, “and that’s when things started to get electric.”
为了找到这些传播病毒的种子，Monello在玩家常去的网站和BBS上泡了数周的时间，学习他们习惯的语言和文化。Monello发现，那些尚未完成的或测试版的新游戏非常受欢迎，于是他让Beta-7这个虚拟人物把游戏测试版发给了那些引导潮流的意见领袖，结果大获成功。
Yes, it is a treacherous world for marketers-and getting worse. Suspicious consumers are now making the job even harder by flooding the Web with their own content. As Jess Greenwood, a writer at Contagious, a British magazine that tracks viral campaigns, points out, “You’re trying to insert a viral video, but you’re competing with homemade films of kids putting Mentos in a Diet Coke bottle.” Talk about authentic entertainment.Worse, as this meta-marketing niche gets more crowded, the very word is losing its meaning: Marketers now proclaim their campaigns “viral” before they’ve even been released. Proving once again that if there’s a way to miss the point, they’ll find it.
不过也有坏消息，对于营销人员来说，他们面对的世界正在变得愈加危险。越来越多由消费者自己生产的内容充斥在网络上，这给想要通过病毒式营销来进行传播的营销人员带来很大威胁。还有些营销人员在病毒还没有扩散时，就误认为自己成功了。错误是不可避免的，关键是如何达到成功。
Language Tips
Bruise擦伤
Innocent 单纯的
Conspiracy 阴谋
Utterly 完全
Bogus 假的
Dissipate 扩散
Pseudo 假的
Leery 不信任的
Treacherous 危险的
Intrigue 引起兴趣
Puppet 木偶、布偶的拉绳者
Shred 撕成碎片的
Labyrinthine 错综复杂，难以理解的事物