Down the Rabbit Hole

Within hours of the sign going up at the auto show, car blogs as far off as Japan were posting photos of the missing A3, and a gritty security video began circulating online of a car being stolen. The story slowly unspooled in TV, print, and online spots. Every few weeks, a classified ad ran in various cities, urging the public to join Nisha on a critical real-world mission to retrieve an SD card from one of the A3s. Each volunteer was required to submit to a background check, and the missions--which took place everywhere from the Coachella Valley Music Festival, in California, to a waffle house in Atlanta--were streamed live to as many as 500,000 people at a time. Finally, after three months of code cracking and plot twists (which included Ian's becoming the prime suspect), the chase concluded at the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica, where 15 audience members helped nail the thief.

David Baldwin, the executive creative director at McKinney-Silver, describes this style of storytelling as "shining the light from the inside out like a lantern--and the moths come to you." But a critical part of ensuring that such a stunt spirals out to the masses is recognizing that not every moth has the time, or the interest, to trek to an Atlanta waffle house. So Campfire designs multiple layers of rabbit holes for people with varying levels of interest: the "divers," who participate minute-by-minute; the "dippers," who casually tune in on the message boards once a week; and the "skimmers," who accidentally read about it while surfing the likes of BoingBoing.net. Rather than cross its fingers and pray for the audience to pass the tale on, Campfire pushed people along by inventing a "fan" to track the saga on his own Web site, summarizing the story for casual observers. "You let the hard-core audience figure the story out and tell it to each other," Monello explains, "then archive it for people who are following along from the sidelines."

For Audi, the payoff for all that attention to detail was pretty impressive: 2 million unique visitors to its site, and 4,000 test-drives within two months. And, in a "compact luxury" category where Mercedes and BMW had tried and failed, Audi sold more than 5,000 cars in the A3's first seven months on the market and saw 75% more dealership leads than on any previous model launch. "It's marketing that pulls in, instead of turns off," says Audi's Berkov.

Hale is stroking his grizzly, ash-colored beard in the corner of a war room in Troy, Michigan. He, Monello, and Wax have been brought in by Pontiac's marketing director, Mark-Hans Richer, to come up with a campaign for the new GXP series--and Richer wants an idea as groundbreaking as "Heist." This time, instead of inventing a narrative, the guys want to build a community around the carmaker on Second Life, the online virtual-reality community of 700,000 players that's growing by a startling 20% a month. On Second Life, people live virtually through their avatars and can do everything from shopping at American Apparel to having sex.

This is a new platform for Campfire, but the art, as ever, is to ensure that Pontiac makes the experience of Second Life better for the community that's already there--then transfers that luster to its real-life brand. The strategy so far is to have Pontiac financially support virtual car-related businesses, such as racetracks and drive-ins, in an online universe where people can create anything but need real-world dollars to do it. (Pontiac won't let us disclose the real-world twist slated to come at the end of the campaign.)

But before the group can get into hashing out specifics, the Campfire guys offer a warning to the ad team at Leo Burnett, Pontiac's agency, about the sensitive socio-economics of this unusual microcosm. Another carmaker, Monello tells them, nearly committed a massive faux pas earlier this year when it started giving away virtual cars to Second Lifers, instead of charging the market rate of about $5. "People who had been on Second Life for years, building cars and selling them, would have immediately gotten pissed off because this big corporation came in and totally crashed the car economy," Monello explains. Make a similar mistake, he says, and the only thing Pontiac would be known for is how its "marketers are f--king up Second Life."

Yes, it is a treacherous world for marketers--and getting worse. Suspicious consumers are now making the job even harder by flooding the Web with their own content. As Jess Greenwood, a writer at Contagious, a British magazine that tracks viral campaigns, points out, "You're trying to insert a viral video, but you're competing with homemade films of kids putting Mentos in a Diet Coke bottle." Talk about authentic entertainment.

Worse, as this meta-marketing niche gets more crowded, the very word is losing its meaning: Marketers now proclaim their campaigns "viral" before they've even been released. Proving once again that if there's a way to miss the point, they'll find it.