Frenzied Waters is a transmedia experience which brought the visceral terror of a shark attack directly to its audience creating an environment of frenzied excitement to launch Discovery Channel’s 2009 Shark Week.

We approached Frenzied Waters as though it were a horror movie, crafting fictional attacks in the first person casting the viewer as the victim.

We engaged entertainment industry influencers, giving them their own stories to tell and harnessed the resulting buzz through combining a powerful digital experience and an innovative application of Facebook.

All of this resolved in a strong drive to tune-in that created the most watched week on Discovery in 2009.

Click here for more information on Frenzied Waters.

This week Mike sat for a lengthy interview with Dan Koelsch and Scott Caldwell from MovieViral.com to talk about online extensions and narrative-based marketing for films and entertainment properties. You can grab the MP3 here, subscribe to the podcast in iTunes [iTunes link], or stream it from MovieViral.com. Big thanks to Scott and Dan for the great chat!

This week, Mike will be attending (and speaking at) Futures of Entertainment 4, hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT. His panel is on Producing Transmedia Experiences, and hell be among an impressive line-up of creators and scholars. If you are attending, look out for him. He’ll be happy to connect!

And boy do they look pretty splayed out across our conference room table. While it was easy displaying them, getting them to our office from Chicago was a very different story.

It all started last Thursday at the Pro Awards, where Jeremiah Rosen and James Young represented Campfire.

Turns out, we won six awards! That much glass is hard to pack in a suitcase, and even harder to fit in the overhead compartment. Something had to be done.

After the event, Jeremiah and James, hands full of statuettes, set off in search of a late night FedEx. No such luck.  Their next thought – try the hotel. Oh, wait, it didn’t have shipping capabilities either. I guess that’s to be expected when it looked like this:

In a last ditch effort, James and Jeremiah strolled into the nearby Marriott Hotel and managed to convince the jolly concierge Albert that they were residents of his fine establishment and needed to send some packages pronto. Albert was happy to oblige. Only problem was, he couldn’t send the packages until the following morning. Not such a bad deal, if the two of them had actually been staying at the Marriott…

5 AM rolled around and our two intrepid “Marriott guests” walked in through the front door, droped off the awards with Albert, and high tailed it to the airport with their fingers-crossed and eyelids heavy.

Low and behold, a few days later, two large FedEx boxes arrived at our office door. Jeremiah got to work opening…

AND OPENING…

Until we had ourselves a table full of awards ready to be photographed.

What a journey, indeed. Once again, big thanks to Albert for his willingness to help…and his inclination to have his back turned towards the front door around 5 AM.

Let’s get this boat floating, shall we. Yesterday, Campfire took home a whopping SIX awards at the 19th annual Pro Awards for our work on HBO’s True Blood. Not only did we receive top honors in every category in which we were nominated, but according to the Pro Awards themselves,  last night was the first time a single campaign had EVER won so many categories. Obviously, we’re pretty pumped.

Take a look at the awards we wrangled in:

Best Multidiscipline Campaign

Most Innovative Communication Strategy

Best Use of Viral Marketing in a Promotion

Best Idea or Concept

Best Creative 

Best Overall Promotion of the Year (well, shucks) 

Campfire’s next big success story – figuring out how to get 50 lbs. of glass statuettes home from Chicago. Stay tuned.

With Ad Week at full-tilt right now, NYC is abuzz with people meeting, people greeting, and people bagging 4 Mixx awards. Aw snap!

The Mixx Awards is a highly acclaimed interactive award competition presented by the IAB and judged by brand marketers, media executives and agency experts from across the country. Some of Campfire’s best and brightest (and currently, most hungover) were there last night to accept awards for our True Blood: Revelation campaign in the following categories:

Gold: New Product Launch

Gold: Digital Integration

Silver: Social Marketing

Bronze: Interactive Video

Not only are we extremely proud of being honored at such a prestigious event, we’re pleased to say we received an award in every category in which we were entered! Better yet, those awards are like, really heavy. We kind of like to think of their weight as being in direct proportion to the amount of work we put into making the campaign really special…because, seriously, if I had to break a window or something (in order to rescue a helpless kitten from a burning pet store, duh), I’d take the Mixx Award over a brick any day.

A lot of love goes out to Deep Focus and …and company too. They helped us out tremendously with the campaign and we’re pumped they were there to share the honor with us as well.

Head over here to take a peek at all the other Mixx Award Winners. Look below to see He-man C.C. hefting one of those beasts with only one hand! Don’t challenge this guy to an arm wrestling competition if you know what’s good for you.

Finally, our managing partner Steve Wax was asked by the conference to create a presentation on “What Advertising’s Creative Revolution Means to Me”…or  ”him”…I hate it when that happens.

Anyway, Steve talked about the importance of finding an audience, entertaining them, measuring them, and fostering debate between them – all done with a brand at  the center. According to Steve, “The audience is now our creative partner” and “We have to recognize [they are] up on stage with us.”

Furthermore, Steve based his entire presentation around a metaphor relating to public nudity, so there. Take a gander at Mr. Wax telling-it-like-it-is below (alas, birthdaysuitless)

On September 7, 2008, HBO premiered True Blood, a new series about vampires from creator Alan Ball (Six Feet Under). In the show, a synthetic blood beverage called “Tru Blood” allows vampires to walk among humans. HBO faced some specific communications challenges marketing True Blood. Primary among them was creating awareness, building buzz and ultimately driving tune-in.

Also, since the vampire genre skews quite young, they needed to identify and attract a new, harder-to-reach demo. We responded to the challenges by launching an integrated event-level marketing campaign designed to explain the back story behind how vampires discover, market, and ultimately use “Tru Blood” to integrate with society. By leveraging all available promotional platforms to generate wide-scale awareness and broaden the audience of a “genre” show, we enabled a deeper engagement with the show from the outset and built an early and loyal audience.

For more information contact Simone Oppenheimer at soppenheimer@campfirenyc.com or 646 837 0340.

from left: Jeremiah Rosen; Steve Wax; Mike Monello; Steve Coulson; C.C. Chapman

Campfire announced today that we have acquired The Advance Guard, CC Chapman’s and Steve Coulson’s highly influential social media company. TAG, as we call The Advance Guard, is one of the first marketing consultancies to focus on the consumer conversation side of emerging technology and community platforms.

We’re extraordinarily happy to have CC, Steve, and their key producer, Victoria Fishel, joining our merry band!

We’ve been working with TAG on a number of our campaigns: HBO’s ‘True Blood’ both 2008 & 2009 seasons; Three years of Verizon’s FIOS TV makeover series, ‘My Home 2.0’; Discovery’s terrific ‘Shark Week’ event programming; and Snapple’s ‘Real Facts’ initiative.

We’d like to welcome The Advance Guard!

Here are a few of the quotes from our release:

“This acquisition was a natural step forward in providing Campfire with access to The Advance Guard’s thinking from day one,” explains Steve Wax, Managing Partner. “We are delighted to have them in-house at Campfire.”

Jeremiah Rosen, Partner and Director of Accounts, commented, “Steve and C.C. have proven themselves crucial to our ideation and execution process time and again. And we now have a new, accessible offering for our current and prospective clients.”

“We’re eager to fully integrate our process into Campfire’s legendary narrative efforts in marketing,” says C.C. Chapman. “Bottom line, brands should be managing their own conversations – and the trend toward bringing on experts to help them do that will continue to grow. Both The Advance Guard and Campfire were built to assist brands in precisely this way, and we look forward to a successful and entertaining ride.”

“Steve Coulson and C.C. Chapman are the master navigators behind the social media scene who make transmedia storytelling possible,” remarks Mike Monello. “We think cross-platform, they execute cross-platform. We create addictive and entertaining content, and they disseminate it strategically based on research and analytics. It’s a perfect match that brings Campfire completely full circle and full service.”

For the Social Media Press Release visit: http://www.campfirenyc.com/SMPR/campfire_acquires_tag/ and http://www.theadvanceguard.com/

Technorati Tags: advertising, Advertising Agencies, Campfire, HBO, MyHome2.0, Shark Week, Snapple, TAG, The Advance Guard, True Blood, Verizon

Current mentions DIY DAYS from lance weiler on Vimeo.

I’m speaking on a panel at DIY Days Philadelphia titled “Extending The Experience.”

PANEL – EXTENDING THE EXPERIENCE
With a decline in the penetration of traditional advertising due to digital technology and the emergence of an on-demand culture, studios and brands are experimenting with extending the way they reach audiences and potential customers. ARG (alternate reality games), virtualization, visualization, geo-locational services, augmented reality and mobile apps are all extending storytelling experiences. But how do you strike the balance between an industry that has come to measure itself by impressions with the value of audience engagement? Where does IP reside when authorship changes and the audience or consumer becomes creator? And is it possible to channel brand dollars into original content? MICHAEL MONELLO (Campfire, producer of the Blair Witch Project), BRIAN CLARK (founder of GMD Studios) and DAVID BEARD (Chief Technology Architect STM), JOHN THREAT (media threat) MODERATOR IVAN ASKWITH (Big Spaceship)

There’s a great lineup of speakers and events, and best of all it’s FREE to attend. All the details are at the DIY Days site. It’s a great way to spend a Saturday and meet a lot of smart people who are actually creating great things. Hope to see you there!