• by June 14, 2007

A&E's viral campaign for "Criss Angel Mindfreak" has resulted in the creation of a million videos in just three weeks, Guy Slattery, senior VP of consumer marketing for A&E Television Networks, said on a PROMAX/BDA panel yesterday.

The promotion, at www.freakyourmind.com, starts when users enter a friend's name, phone number and email address. Then, the friend gets an email from the user, containing a URL and a message to "check this out." When the URL is clicked on, the friend gets a YouTube-like video, where Criss Angel guesses his or her name and then does a card trick where the phone number appears. Soon after, the phone rings and Criss himself is on the line asking the friend to tune in to the series.

Slattery said the campaign is still generating 45,000 videos a day, a week after the show's third season launched--leading to the question of "when do we turn it off?" "We have to pay for all those phone calls," he joked.

Thanks to both the viral campaign and in-game ads on Xbox Live, Slattery said, ratings for "Mindfreak" are up 18% over last season.

The PROMAX panel, titled "How to Drive Tune-In Using the Power of the Internet," also touched on another premiere--last night's "Lil' Bush" on Comedy Central.

Catherine Moran, the network's vice president of consumer and trade marketing, said a viral video for that series generated 9,000 views in just 18 hours. With the character already popular on Amp'd Mobile, Comedy Central also used the viral power of blogs by hosting a screening for more than 40 bloggers in a downtown New York loft. She said it resulted in 40 feature stories about the shows.

Both Moran and Doug Yates, senior vice president of marketing for TV Guide Network, keyed in the power of MySpace to drive tune-in.

Yates said that a MySpace contest for TV Guide Network's series "Look-a-Like" attracted 172,000 unique visitors--four times the average for similar MySpace contests--and led to a 30% ratings increase for the 18-34 demo, as well as lowering the average age of the network's viewers "significantly," and serving as an entry point for sampling of other network shows.

The TV Guide Network promotion asked users to upload their photos and tell which celebrities they look like. The network supported the contest with a media flight of 15 million impressions, Yates said--and MySpace, which wanted to drive traffic to its own new fashion section, provided another 200 million impressions.

The contest received 5,000 entries, and 9,000 people voted for the winner. Furthermore, what started out as a contestant search--the grand prize winner was to be featured in this season's finale--turned into a content play as well, with Yates saying that "we were so happy with the four semifinalists" that they will all be involved with the series.

Moran said that Comedy Central created five "South Park" character profiles on MySpace to celebrate the show's 10th anniversary, resulting in more than 1 million page views over a two-month period; 250,000 characters added as "friends"; and 600,000 profiles placed elsewhere on MySpace. The result: an 80% increase in ratings for males 18-34, and 38% for males 18-45.

Quantitative results of using MySpace are important, of course, but Yates pointed out another advantage of MySpace promotions--"qualitative feedback" in the form of show suggestions and the like that "would have cost a fortune in other research techniques. It's like doing an instant national focus group."