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How "The Blair Witch Project" Cast Online Marketing Magic (Fall 1999)

It started innocently enough. Yet another press release announcing that an independent film company had acquired the rights to a film at a festival:

ARTISAN ENTERTAINMENT ACQUIRES THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

Park City, UT (January 24, 1999) "Striking immediately after the film's initial screening, Artisan Entertainment has acquired the worldwide rights to one of the most highly anticipated films at this year's Sundance Film Festival, 'The Blair Witch Project', a harrowing firsthand account of three documentary filmmakers who venture into the Black Hills of Maryland in search of the truth about the local scaremonger, the mythic Blair Witch. After the trio disappear without a trace, their footage is unearthed one year later, revealing a terrifying account of the events which marked their final days. The edited chronicle of the filmmaker's discoveries forms the chilling content of the film."

BREAKING BOX-OFFICE AND INTERNET RECORDS

The surprise box office hit of the summer of '99, "The Blair Witch Project", for those who have been on Mars since the Spring of this year, is a low-budget "mockumentary" horror film about three film students who disappear in a forest in Maryland while searching for a fabled witch. The movie's official web site, http://www.blairwitch.com, features a mock history of the fictitious witch myth and information on the "missing" student filmmakers. "Blair Witch" has become perhaps one of the most profitable movies ever made.

Co-directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, and produced by five students from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, "Blair Witch" cost "$30,000 when we left the woods of Maryland, but a lot more once we got into Sundance", says Sanchez.

Artisan reportedly spent $10 million on distribution and promotion, a small figure by Hollywood standards. The average domestic marketing budget for a big budget studio film is about $25 million, and a movie with high profile stars can run more than $30 million. BWP has earned more than $130 million thus far, made overnight fortunes for its co-directors, and has become one of the most profitable films in history.

Part of the movie's astounding success is the fact that it used the Internet as its primary marketing vehicle, a case of guerrilla marketing at its best. In addition to the movie's official site, over thirty fan sites sprung up. The filmmakers and marketers used the internet to create the buzz (the site has received more than 75 million hits to date) by propagating the elaborate "Blair Witch'' mythology that serves as the film's backstory, and that buzz translated into box office receipts.

John Hegeman, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for Artisan Entertainment, notes that the directors of BWP had already created a site prior to Artisan acquiring the movie [the site was launched in June of 1998]. Says co-director Myrick, "The Internet was early on our way of raising awareness about the film. It was an inexpensive way to promote the mythology and back story associated with the movie. And that, in turn, generated a loyal fan base, which created a lot of buzz and word of mouth going into Sundance. And that's where it all started. The Internet was integral to all that."

"And it's really responsible for the huge numbers we got in our first two weeks out", adds Sanchez.

As Digitrends.net News reported on August 9th: "'The Blair Witch Project' has jumped out of nowhere—leaving Internet analysts and users spellbound by its surprise success. The low-budget horror film sent shockwaves last week, nabbing one of the top spots in box office totals—all this with minimal (if any) traditional advertising efforts. In fact, the movie generated most of its hype and media attention with the use of the Internet. The movie's Web site, http://www.blairwitch.com entered into the top 50 sites as the number of unique visitors jumped by 67 percent from several weeks ago, according to a survey by Nielsen//NetRatings, an Internet measurement service from Nielsen Media Research and NetRatings, Inc." According to the survey, the site captured nearly 648,000 visitors that week, with an average 16.1 minutes spent per person on the site.

The R-rated film also received buzz among the all-important 13- to 25-year-old moviegoing demographic (52% of the audience visiting the official Web site was 24 years old or younger) when nearly two months before the film's release, MTV News ran a story on the proliferation of "Blair Witch" fan sites.

Artisan's Hegeman explained that, "Artisan utilizes the internet as a marketing tool for all releases...All forms of media were used to support the release of BWP. There was no online advertising, but there were plenty of online promotions created to support the film. The costs incurred for our online presence were certainly miniscule compared to what it would have cost if we tried to attract the same number of people through traditional methods...The first important effort in kicking off the BWP was featuring the trailer on [Harry Knowles'] 'aint-it-cool-news.com' and linking the website to the BWP website."

Artisan launched a grassroots campaign on college campuses, published a book, and disseminated "Wanted'' posters depicting the doomed filmmakers. They also produced a promotional film, "Curse of the Blair Witch," a faux-documentary about the faux-documentary, which explored the Blair Witch myth and the disappearance in detail. Its airing on the Sci Fi Channel helped boost interest in the film. As Amorette Jones, Artisan's Vice President of Marketing, described it, "We didn't do a grand slam, blockbuster media buy, but slowly built awareness by permeating the youth culture.''

Cary Jones, vice president of marketing for Landmark Theaters, said Internet marketing was particularly effective with "Blair Witch'' because the film's audience is the same one that regularly uses the Internet "to glean information on the arts and what's going on in their world.''

REACHING A TARGETED MARKET

Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, said "Blair Witch'' marks "the first time someone used the Internet to draw an audience into theaters—as opposed to just providing information. It's woken up the studio system and the independent world to the Internet as a marketing tool that's much more powerful than a billboard.''

At Artisan, a "Blair Witch'' follow-up is planned "No one has seen a script,'' Amorette Jones says, "so whether it's a sequel or prequel or something just delving within the legend of the Blair Witch, we're not sure...We'll have an ongoing development with the cast and the filmmakers...I think it will have lasting impact on independent cinema, which is the most exciting element to me. It opens so many doors for new filmmakers, but also opens the eyes of the studiosŸ" Notes Hegeman, "All of Artisans [future] releases will have a strong internet presence".

Sean Badding, Vice President & Senior Analyst at The Carmel Group, summed it up: "The Internet is reshaping the traditional marketing and distribution landscape. In 1990 B.I. (Before Internet), a movie like the "Blair Witch Project" would have garnered a decent amount of interest from people through typical media outlets, like newspapers, TV and radio. But, a 'Blair Witch'-type movie B.I. could have appealed to an even larger audience, if there were only some kind of community where people with similar interests could interact with one another.

The Internet, for the most part, is providing that interactive community to people who share a particular interest. These people are going to websites, chatting online and talking with a group of people about something they enjoyed from the movie, or feared for that matter. Plus, the online experience brings people who normally would have waited for the home video, to go out and see it on the silver screen. The 'Blair Witch Project' is one example of how the Internet, and its ability to capture a larger audience, is changing the marketing landscape." The impact, no doubt, will be bewitching.

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