Immersive Marketing: Marketing an Experience
By Nalini Humphrey on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007For the CSI fans out there – good news, now you can become a part of the CSI intrigue by gathering clues and solving mysteries, in Second Life that is! That’s right – the makers of CSI: New York will be developing a storyline, in the fall, where a murderer escapes into Second Life where you, the general public and obsessed fans can take part in the investigation and help to solve the mystery.
This is a great way, I think, for the show to use an emerging media to include their audience in an amazing interactive experience. It seems that ideas like this are one of many ways that marketers are creatively capturing the imagination and eyeballs.
Take for example the ingenious marketing of several TV shows (Heroes, Lost, etc.) where a trail of clues to random websites that lead to other websites, emails, and even text messages are left for the fans that are loyal and brilliant enough to figure them out. They uncover hidden storylines, plots and much more.
And the same is being done for movies, check out for instance this interesting post on mentalfloss.com that talks about the upcoming movie by J.J. Abrams that has no name – but yet is being advertised. This is the type of immersive marketing that I can see as the next wave of the future. It’s not just a combination of website, email, direct mail, and (does this even exist anymore?) telemarketing. It is a full on experience and I for one cannot wait to ride that wave.
It’s been very interesting to watch real life fuse with virtual reality. In the same vein … I read that HBO has picked up “My Second Life: The Video Diaries of Molotov Alva.” Basically, it’s a documentary that follows the life of this Molotov character. The show will premiere in ‘08.
You know I’m into this. I think it’s interesting, though, and definitely noteworthy what this mental_floss blogger says in his post about the audience for this type of marketing:
“It’s questionable how successful these types of campaigns really are, though. They appeal to a select group of people, those with enough free time (or a really boring job) to scour websites. You need to have a pretty extreme passion for the subject already, which is why Batman gets this treatment while, say, the Devil Wears Prada didn’t.”