In the beginning was the Word — or, as they call it in Hollywood, word of mouth.
For as long as there have been movies, studio marketers have relentlessly pursued ways to get people to talk about them. Whether through grabby trailers, glowing reviews or the water-cooler recommendations of satisfied audiences, word of mouth was the engine that could organically turn a little-known film into a sleeper hit through the power of communal buzz.
In the 1990s, the explosive growth of the internet promised to supercharge this engine into a high-speed, global force, extending the reach of movie marketing campaigns into uncharted corners of what was still being quaintly called “cyberspace.” But at a time when the concept of virality was still confined to infectious diseases, it took a low-budget, under-the-radar horror movie called “The Blair Witch Project” to wake up the industry to this new tool’s full revolutionary potential.
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