Research into Viral Ads

Viral marketing is a method of marketing where it engages the audience and encourages them to share the ad with friends via the internet and other interaction. These tend to reach a widespread demographic as the audience gets excited and so wants to share it with others. This method is commonly used amongst big cinematic films, such as Batman, and they tend to be extremely successful when they reach enough people.
For example, Batman The Dark Knight Rises did viral marketing when releasing their film. They spray painted the iconic Batman symbol in various places around the world. Fans had to find these symbols, take pictures of them and post them in the hashtag on the social media site, Twitter, to unlock frames of the trailer. Once all the pictures were found, it unlocked the entire trailer. This method engaged fans, while creating excitement for them and creating a fun way to release the trailer. In fact, this was so successful that the twitter hashtag trended higher than The Avengers, a competing film.

Viral marketing has been largely helped by the exponential growth in advancement of internet and other technologies. For example, in recent years there has been a large amount proliferation amongst technological devices, such as phones and laptops. Now almost everyone has access to the internet which has enabled viral marketing techniques, such as Batman, to become so successful.
Viral marketing could be a huge benefit in the advertisement of our film as it is often free/low cost. The use of internet doesn't cost anything extra when advertising our film as we already have access to the internet, and so this could be an effective way of advertising an independent film like ours.