The Social Media Campaign for The Watchmen: “Viral” or Just Smart Media Strategy?

A lot has been written about the social media campaign for The Watchmen. It’s extremely well-executed, although the film’s only doing modestly well at the box office. But is it really “viral”? I don’t think so, and I’ll explain why.

I was unfamiliar with the graphic novel when I saw The Watchmen in the theater and was pleasantly surprised. I found it more of an adult revisionist history of post-WWII American politics than a “superhero” movie. And I enjoyed the film so much that I started looking around the Web for stuff about the graphic novel (I know, what a geek).

After a few simple searches, I tried a slightly more esoteric one.

Dr. Manhattan in Vietnam

And wouldn’t you know, I found exactly what I was looking foron flickr. I discovered this rather cool image had been uploaded by a user named, “The New Frontiersman” and his photostream had all kinds of awesome Watchmen stuff in it. I particularly enjoyed the shot above which was prominent in the movie.

Curious, I went over to YouTube to see what other Watchmen-related stuff I could find and used the same search term. Yep, there he was again “The New Frontiersman.” This time, he’d created a channel of very slickly produced “news segments” from the ’70s and ’80s of The Watchmen. Obviously big budget stuff. Obviously studio-backed.

Finally, I Googled “The New Frontiersman” and found the repository for all the media I was seemingly stumbling upon by chance. Turns out, it’s the name of a right-wing newspaper that the character Rorschach reads. Very inside baseball stuff—the kind of trivia only avid fans of the novel would know.

And that was the point.

“You look at the ads for the Watchmen right now and it seems like superhero, high-action, comic-hero-type stuff,” said Paul Kontonis, co-founder and chief executive of the Manhattan-based Web production company For Your Imagination, which was hired by Warner Bros. agency MediaCom to create a series of original videos as part of the Watchmen viral marketing campaign. “If you’re not into capes and masks and all that kind of stuff, you might not be drawn to it. But there’s a lot deeper of a story line going on here.”

Indeed.

So why don’t I think this campaign is “viral”? Because Warner Bros. made no effort to hide their ownership of “The New Frontiersman.” Sure, the videos, photos and articles were probably passed around between fanboys. But sharing in itself doesn’t make it a viral campaign.

For my money, a true viral campaign retains some element of mystery about it—either its origin or its content—and isn’t distributed from a branded hub or channel, but leaked initially, then (cross your fingers) spread organically. To wit: was Ronaldinho really hitting the bar? Was that a real minor league baseball game? Was that real dynamite?

Put another way, if Warner Bros. ran a series of targeted radio or print buys using the exact same content they rolled out on “The New Frontiersman,” would we call that “viral”? Nope, we’d call it a tease campaign.

Warner Bros. executed a very smart, highly targeted social media campaign, hoping to build a groundswell of excitement among Watchmen fans. And I think the studio did a great job, because the content was exceptionally well done and they gave it away on high-traffic sites, making it exceedingly easy to find.

Just don’t call it viral.