CHALLENGE

Fox Home Video was about to launch the direct to video feature-length Family Guy DVD. The success of the show, both in the U.S. and Canada, was due to the incredible support of fans, many of whom discovered the show on DVD. Fox and their media buying agency, MindShare, challenged Fuel to raise awareness of the DVD launch online using nontraditional online media to support their overall TV and print campaign, one of the largest ever by Fox for a DVD release.

STRATEGY

Since so many of the Family Guy fans are 18-35 males, who are typically online and enjoy sending their friends humorous media, the team determined that a viral campaign would work perfectly. The franchise also lends itself well to viral marketing, since it is inherently humorous and irreverent. As Family Guy fans ourselves, we had quite a few ideas that were, to quote Peter, "freakin' sweet!" and wish we could have built them all, if only to play them. Reviewing all of the ideas alongside MindShare, we determined the one that would be sure to be passed along for its simplicity, and played with to death for its depth - Interactive Stewie.

CREATIVE & EXECUTION

The most commonly occurring keywords were pre-determined through test research, and scenarios for those keywords were developed. Fuel took flash animation to a point nearly indistinguishable from TV animation on the site with approximately 40 primary animation and 130 lip synchs implemented using audio tracks from the show, including one where Stewie practices killing his mother, and another where he pretends to take over the world. He'll also eat, fart, dance, and of course, make love to a pig.

Additional to the viral strategy, Fuel added a tactical idea to increase both the virulence and the stickiness of the site: the mysterious kill button. What does it do? How do you activate it? Inactive until users have spent a considerable amount of time on the site, it glows when ready, and when pressed, allows users to see a finale of sorts. By rewarding fans for the amount of time the spent on the site with an exclusive scene, they were encouraged to stay longer - and talk about what happened when they did.

Keywords to try: Kill Lois, take over the world, dance, eat, fart, jump, lotion, sing, weapon, British, hack. There are 160 - enjoy looking for them! If you want a complete list, give us a call.

PERFORMANCE

The DVD had one of the best selling launches ever. In the first two weeks, the site had hundreds of thousands of visitors, and was popping up on blogs all over the Internet, as well as on major entertainment sites like Beer.com, fan sites and media sites like MSNBC.com and AOL.com. Ever better, the average interaction time has been very high - about 10 minutes per user, with many spending significantly more time on the site than that.