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Philipp Steinweber / blog and portfolio
awesome viral marketing by nin
Saturday, 10. March 2007

The upcoming Nine Inch Nails Album “Year Zero” attracts lots of attention because of a really innovative marketing campaign by Trent Reznor and 42 Entertainment:
It started with mysterious USB Sticks which were found by fans on the toilets at NIN live concerts, containing a new unreleased song each. Later on, fans recognized special merchandise t-shirts with single bold printed letters which formed the sentence “I am trying to believe” - what led to the website iamtryingtobelieve.com. The weird paper chase just begins at this point: more and more hints, sound files, telephone numbers and morse codes were found, forming an extraordinary story all together.
This way, the agency creates a alternate reality game, which attracts attention from outside, and embeds fans as the mainspring of the paper chase. I’m really looking forward to see more innovative concepts in this field!
Read more at: fudder (german), the NIN Wiki, Fan Forum article.

But now the story got a negative side as well: users which shared the songs from the usb sticks got dunned by a lawyer, because the record label wasn’t really involved in this project. Innovation meets dusty bureaucracy.
Read more at Basic Thinking and Irgendwas ist ja immer (both german).

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