ABSTRACT
Just prior to The Cluetrain Manifesto’s publication in the spring of 1999, along came a micro-movie called The Blair Witch Project. Cluetrain (www.cluetrain.org) had argued that the future of the Internet and therefore the majority of all future business was rooted in conversations. Top-down marketing was over. Two-way dialogue was the only way to go. The Blair Witch Project’s marketing campaign, however, managed to go far further than just a two-way, company-to-customer dynamic. Indeed, the impact of its pioneering viral campaign benchmarked the film much higher than either the filmmakers or its distributor Artisan Entertainment ever imagined when acquired at Sundance in January 1999 for $1.1m. Made for approximately $50,000 and grossing more than $100m at the US theatrical box office alone, the low-to-nobudget shocker-horror film was the movie industry’s first mainstream Internet marketing success. It left the major Studios’ shoehorning of the Internet as a secondary, supplementary marketing tool standing still in the water.
