Make no mistake, for all his punctuational excess, Knowles has really got the goods--and it sends movie moguls around the bend because they'd just as soon keep things extremely hush-hush until they're good and ready. But no such luck. A battalion of loyal undercover snoops (who file reports under goofy fake names like "the Swede") leak the cinematic scuttlebutt straight from soundstages and obscure film festivals and rough-cut test screenings and early script run-throughs, and Knowles tells all.
So around the time that 3-D model vanished from my West Coast moviehouse, raves--raves!!!--started to roll in from 23 of Knowles's spies who had just wangled their way into a rough-cut screening of Titanic outside Minneapolis. Those unauthorized reviews produced authoritative Internet buzz ("This movie's not the dog you heard it was") that attracted more and more attention as it spread, accelerando. People noticed. By autumn, you could sense the shift was nearly complete: before it had even opened, Titanic had gone from washout to once-in-a-couple-of-decades classic, on a par with Gone with the Wind, if you believe the review that ultimately ran in the New York Times. Thanks to Knowles's gang, underground buzz triggered the one thing all the studio money in the world couldn't--big momentum--and Titanic began its amazing rise. (Interestingly, the Web site Students Online has a section called StreetSpeak, which tracks language used by mostly teens and preteens. One of the new words on its list is titanical, meaning something really good.)
Now I should mention that if Titanic had been a real turkey, raves wouldn't have amounted to much (and surely would have compromised the reviewers' credibility), because buzz does not lie. It is its duty to be honest, a stalwart in a crowd of hucksters. Pseudobuzz, on the other hand, bites off more than it can chew and is easy to spot because it creates dissonance. Something's off somewhere: think of any gushy over-the-top PR, a customers-come-first campaign in the commercial-airline business, a line like "I didn't inhale." Real buzz has that familiar ring of truth. It clicks.
Every would-be buzzmeister has to learn when to let buzz grow by itself and when to step in and give it a nudge. Consider the Dancing Baby, a weird, surreal-looking animated infant that cha-chaed its way into TV-land last January by showing up in two episodes of Fox's hit series Ally McBeal. The boogying baby was one of 12 characters introduced two years ago by Kinetix, located in San Francisco, a multimedia division of Autodesk Inc., which is headquartered in San Rafael, Calif. (With revenues of $617 million, Autodesk is the fifth-largest software company in the world.) "It was a simple tutorial for our customers," says Kinetix general manager Jim Guerard, who tapped bargain-priced freelance talent from a three-person company called Unreal Pictures, in Palo Alto, Calif., to imagine and design the characters.
About six months later Kinetix got wind of E-mail floating around with the Dancing Baby clip attached. "Users modified the files," Guerard says, "and shipped them around the Web to their friends," and that's how David E. Kelley, the creator, producer, and writer of Ally McBeal, got onto it. It was perfect for an episode in which lawyer McBeal (played by Calista Flockhart) worries about her biological clock.
Baby buzz has been a godsend for Kinetix, which has sought to raise its profile, especially in the entertainment community. Guerard says the bopping bambino has built brand awareness and visibility with minimal cash. Hits to the Kinetix Web site have surged, as has traffic to the best unofficial Dancing Baby site, run by Seattle high school student Rob Sheridan. Merchandising is likely (you can already get a Dancing Baby screen saver), with more clips to follow this year.
Kinetix was quick to realize that customers created their own kind of baby love, and the company wisely capitalized on that. To do otherwise--to attempt to build buzz by force--would have killed it. Instead, Kinetix made it easy as pie to copy the digital baby file, modify it, and pass it on. Only when the baby bombination was clearly audible did the company start to put together some PR, in case the craze continued and people wanted to know more.
There's another commonsense principle at work here. If you give stuff away as fast as you can, you whip up interest, which is the down payment buzz requires. It always surprises me how businesspeople devote so much time to building barriers to entry when they'd be so much smarter to let it rip!
Creative giveaways are practically a credo for Little Earth Productions, a $3-million Pittsburgh-based company that recycles license plates, bottle caps, and street signs and turns them into belts, bags, and datebooks. With an assist from an agent or two, Little Earth's just plain cool products have made guest appearances on TV shows like Home Improvement, prime-time exposure that didn't hurt the company's sales. But some of Little Earth's other marketing maneuvers to create buzz are more backyard.
When a Pittsburgh woman was crowned Miss Pennsylvania this year, Little Earth sent her a fleet of their "Cyclone" purses, shoulder bags made from old license plates. Miss Pennsylvania kept the one made from Pennsylvania plates, and she gave those made from other states' plates to her sister contestants in the Miss USA pageant. Little Earth was betting on those Cyclones to see plenty of shutter action in the media frenzy that preceded the March pageant.
