Novelist Scott Sigler's horror column appears every Thursday.

It's not every day you open your mail to find a test tube full of some random red fluid. Well, maybe not for you -- my fans send me their blood about every other day -- but I mean, in general, a test tube full of blood in your mailbox is weird. The vial in question was labeled "TruBlood" and had a piece of paper attached with all kinds of weird writing. Being a child of the Internet, my first reaction was "I have no idea what this pseudo-Sumerian writing is, I'll look it up online." And exactly 0.25 seconds later, my second reaction was, "Oh ... another viral marketing campaign."

True Blood
My instincts were right. The tube was part of a viral marketing campaign for HBO's new vampire series, True Blood. Based on a series of books by Charlaine Harris, the show is a clever new take on the hackneyed genre of vampires and nubile vampire hunters, where development of a synthetic human blood replacement allows vamps to come out of the shadows and live among us.

This post isn't about the series (which I haven't seen), but about the viral marketing of it. Are fake websites the future of horror movie marketing? If you are a blogger (and is there anyone left in who isn't?), you can prepare to be targeted at one point or another for a campaign like True Blood's. It's almost a horror movie concept unto itself -- the question isn't if you'll be targeted, but when. 

The campaign was created by the ad agency Campfire, which was founded by the producers of The Blair Witch Project (the Grandmammy of all viral campaigns, addressed below). More detail about the campaign is in this New York Times article. Campfire orchestrated the whole campaign, but the decision to target me was made by a company called The Advance Guard

Founders C.C. Chapman and Steve Coulson worked to identify influencers and get the word out. Chapman and Coulson are no strangers to viral campaigns, but the TruBlood initiative required an old-tech angle that proved ironically difficult. "The hard part for us was that it was decided to send a physical mailer," Coulson said. "That meant we had to reduce our ideal list down to those for whom we could dig up mailing addresses, and you have no idea how hard that was."

(Not hard enough, apparently, because if Advance Guard can find my home address, so can the bill collectors and the guys serving those child paternity suits.)

The TruBlood campaign began by mailing mysterious black envelopes with secret message written in an ancient language. Cracking these messages revealed a site with a live Vampire gatekeeper (or maybe a better phrase would be a real-time undead gatekeeper). For three nights, hundreds of players attempted to get past the gatekeeper. When they finally did, they found a rich vampire community, including videos, images and text messages -- the initial backstory to the world of True Blood. As buzz began to grow, vials of TruBlood were mailed out to a smaller core of influencers. In major cities, trucks delivered TruBlood; stores carried "sold out" posters in shop windows, etc. The campaign continued with great mock websites like trubeverage.com.

Now as fun as this sounds, all of this effort begs a basic question -- why don't you just tell us about the damn show? This is an awful lot of effort to trick people into learning about something, don't you think? However, if True Blood is a hit, you can bet you'll be seeing viral campaigns for Freddy Krueger's Outpatient Psychology franchises and Repo LikeNu™ Reconditioned Kidneys. True Blood, of course, is not the first to roll the viral dice...

Cloverfield and Mistaken Identity
One of the all-time biggest viral coups has to be the "Ethan Was Right" viral campaign for J.J. Abram's Cloverfield. This generated thousands of blog posts for the viral game and had people scrambling to identify the mythos and background surrounding the monster. Was it alien? Was it Cthulu? The campaign like a charm -- the only thing was the campaign wasn't for Cloverfield. It was for a card game called Alpha Omega by Mind Storm Labs. Everyone seemed to win in this case of mistaken identity -- Abrams got street cred for a campaign that no one could figure out how it connected to the movie, and millions of hits were tallied by Mind Storm Labs. The irony of the situation was that Abrams did have viral sites set up, but those didn't catch on. Abrams has more tricks up his sleeve for Cloverfield 2, but this case of mistaken-identity is the second-most successful horror-movie viral campaign of all time. The first? There's no question about that ...

The Blair Witch Project
Of course when it comes to online viral marketing, you have to talk about the movie that started the whole concept -- the Blair Witch Project. Made for $60,000 and grossing over $245 million, the movie was a phenomenon and remains the highest-grossing indie film of all time... and the movie itself had almost nothing to do with the financial success. I remember a co-worker showing me a site talking about the Blair Witch, and being confused whether it was a documentary or not. That was the sweet spot right there: You weren't sure if this was a Hollywood film made to look like a real event, or a real event that had jumped over to a big-screen release. That magic of not knowing not only drove people to theaters, it had them emailing, talking in chat rooms and showing online info to friends and coworkers.

But now that people know about these campaigns, they can't be replicated in the same way anymore. Viral is the first thing many people assume when they see something strange online (for example, take a look at the comments posted about this monster washing ashore in Montauk). If you need a fake campaign to generate interest in your product, then I'm assuming your product itself isn't very interesting to begin with. That being said, all you fancy pants Hollywood marketers: If you still want to go fully viral, call The Advance Guard ... they know where people live. 

Scott Sigler writes tales of hard-science horror, then gives them away as free audiobooks at www.scottsigler.com. His hardcover debut Infected is available in stores now. If you don't agree with what Scott says in this blog, please email him scott@scottsigler.com. Please include all relevant personal information, such as your address and what times you are not home, in case Scott wishes to send someone to "discuss" your opinions.