The 4400 Goes Viral (Marketing)
May 23rd, 2007 | by Tama |The 4400 has taken to viral marketing dramatically in order to build the word before the upcoming fourth season of the TV show. According to AdWeek:
To promote the new season of The 4400 on USA Network, Campfire has created a wide-ranging interactive world consisting of 80 videos that run from 30 seconds to five minutes and six Web sites. [...] The 4400 follows 4,400 people who are abducted, taken away and then returned to planet Earth. After their return, many of them discover they have superpowers. As the fourth season begins on June 17, the plot follows the development of a drug called Promicin: it gives the users superpowers, if it doesn’t kill them. Three different factions emerge around the drug: pro, anti- and neutral.
On YouTube, for example, one of the show’s stars, Billy Campbell, appears in character as Jordan Collier, advocating Promicin and the decrying the government’s attempts to ban the drug. Here’s Jordan Collier dispatch #3:
Elsewhere on the net, we can find the Promicin Power website, which argues that Promicin is the key to world peace and a sustainable relationship with nature. Here’s one example that looks like it could be have been a United Colours of Bennetton advertisement in a past life:
