The Blair Witch Project (1999)

What to Expect

The Blair Witch Project stands today in Internet marketing history as the most successful viral marketing campaign of all time, so much so that it's taught in marketing business course materials to this day. The actual budget should include the multi-million dollar Internet advertising campaign plus the cost of maintaining the website and planting an army of shills in online forums to spread rumors, becoming one of the first instances of 'œfake news' monetized. The box office sounds less impressive when you add in'¦ Wait. Wait a minute. There's an actual movie in here. I forgot. That's easy to forget, because to this very day when I ask a modern fan what they loved about the Blair Witch project, the first thing they rave about is the marketing. They go on about marketing, marketing, marketing, and if I pin them down to the movie they barely have a fuzzy recollection of the general gist of it. Then they get defensive and say the marketing was part of a whole experience inseparable from the movie. Even Entertainment Weekly couldn't stick to the movie in the review, but had to excuse it as 'œa manifestation of multimedia synergy.' That's great if you're into that, but that's not how we play ball here.