Earlier this week, a video showing a guy hacking into NYC’s Times Square with his iPhone went viral.
With over a million views later and 95% believing it to be real, another video was uploaded touting:
Check out my new video that answers all of your questions. It explains what made it all possible.
This video gave us a few seconds of footage before the previously posted video, plus a movie trailer at the end.
Oh.
A movie trailer.
This was part of a viral marketing campaign for the new movie “Limitless“, which was designed and implemented by the marketing agency Thinkmodo. In fact, the YouTube account that was used belonged to Thinkmodo’s founder Michael Krivicka.
Krivicka had this to say:
We needed to create something that would get everyone’s attention and that would go viral. It had to be something that has never been done before and it had to be in harmony with the movie’s concept (concept: you take a pill and it enables you to use 100% of your brain). So we came up with the idea of creating a hack scenario on Times Square which would spark many conversations about technology, public safety, etc… The “inventor” would be a user of the NZT pill which enabled him to create a revolutionary device that lets him hack into any video screen. The subtle connection to the film is the actual trailer (playing on the jumbotron in the final scene) it is the trailer for Limitless, which is coming out tomorrow.
How did we do it technically? Well, as you can see on the comments, 95% believed (and still believe) that it was all done in post production. However, all we really did was rent the screens and had our footage loop there for hours. The clips had visual sync points which allowed us to sync the iPhone version of the video. Once the sync was done, then it was a piece of cake from there. The actor was familiar with the timing of the “hacks”. We did hundreds of takes on each screen.
This is was a very impressive campaign from start to finish. It certainly was an attention getter, although, I wouldn’t recommend tricking your audience as a rule of thumb.
[via TNW]
Stephen Bateman says
#sadpanda.
Eric Dye says
There’s goes your plan for world domination …