The Blair Witch Project: The First Viral Marketing Campaign

Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez shot their horror film on an $60,000 budget in 8 days. But their real genius was the marketing. Starting in 1998, they launched a website — blairwitch.com — that treated the film's events as real: fake police reports, manufactured newspaper articles, fake documentary footage about the 'Blair Witch' legend. At the Sundance Film Festival in 1999, they distributed missing persons flyers for the 'students' — posters featuring the actors' real names and photos, asking anyone with information to contact authorities. Most crucially, they convinced IMDb to list the three actors as 'missing, presumed dead.' Internet forums debated furiously whether the footage was real. The film opened on 27 screens. The per-screen average was $56,000 — among the highest ever recorded. USA Today called it 'the first film to go viral.'

The film's marketing worked because it weaponized the internet's emerging information infrastructure against itself. The website predated the film's release by a year, building a mythology that audiences discovered and spread before the product existed. The uncertainty — is this real? — was more compelling than any advertising claim.

Grossed $248 million worldwide on a $60,000 production budget — one of the highest ROI films in history. Website received 160 million hits by August 1999. Named the 'first film to go viral' by USA Today. Invented the found-footage genre and the ARG (Alternate Reality Game) as a marketing tool.