Mike Monello and his partners at Campfire are known for creating and producing marketing campaigns that tell a rich story, sometimes crossing into the realm of mystery.
Campfire has created campaigns for NFL 2K4, HBO’s True Blood and the Discovery Channel, each utilizing mystery stories to get diehard gamers/vampire-lore-lovers/shark enthusiasts interested. From there they rely on strategic placement and viral power to spread their work beyond the echo chamber. But there’s a fine line between story telling and deception, and today that’s what we spoke about.
The TourismDenmark campaign is still reverberating after it went viral this weekend. From what we can tell it garnered about a million pageviews before being removed from YouTube. Neither the client nor Grey, the agency responsible, has said much since it was revealed to be fake.
Monello doesn’t think this work crossed a moral line, but he does question the value of a campaign whose potency lives and dies by whether or not it’s real. Efforts like Droga5’s Mark Ecko tags AirforceOne, guys jumping into jeans and guys throwing Ray-Bans are clearly not real — but they’re still interesting to watch and get play months after landing.
The question that remains is did Grey do wrong? Monello was reluctant to make a clear assessment as are we — after all, a million views in three days is nothing short of impressive. Monello, for one, wonders how many plays came from marketing professionals like you and angry Danish women — a question that we can’t answer. But one that does remain: what value can be wrung from it?
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