11/09/2006 10:08:00 AM 
Interestingly, two of Campfire's founders were part of the team that made Blair Witch; the mother of all viral ideas.
There are some great pointers in the article that relate back to the Transmedia Planning model and provide it with even more context.
Not every campaign needs a viral component or has to play like an alternative reality game, but there are some fundamental rules that are relevant and can be applied.
1. Idea Creation is a Marathon, not a Sprint
Creating a viral campaign isn't like filming a 30-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' worth of backlogged blog entries to give Beta-7 a history.
2. The Best Ideas exploit the "Curiosity Gap"
Campfire's work, he says, capitalizes on the "curiosity gap," a term coined in the 1990s 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.
3. Good Viral Contradicts with the Traditional Creative Model
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.
4. You Have to Understand Your Communities
Campfire guys offer a warning to the ad team at Leo Burnett, Pontiac's agency, about the sensitive socio-economics of this unusual microcosm. Another carmaker, Monello tells them, nearly committed a massive faux pas earlier this year when it started giving away virtual cars to Second Lifers, instead of charging the market rate of about $5. "People who had been on Second Life for years, building cars and selling them, would have immediately gotten pissed off because this big corporation came in and totally crashed the car economy," Monello explains. Make a similar mistake, he says, and the only thing Pontiac would be known for is how its "marketers are f--king up Second Life."
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