John Raymond

In the fall of 2006, I was charged with coming up with some kind of interactive contest to target a “younger audience.” The typical target audience for Playhouse Square is women age 60-65. We felt that Spamalot was a great show to test out this sort of contest.

After doing some research, I came up with a Viral Video Contest. This was a relatively new thing at the time. I carefully studied some of the successful campaigns and broke down the elements that got the campaign off the ground. With no budget, I had to get creative and wrote and starred in an edgy viral video to help promote the contest.

We launched a mini-site (which I designed and constructed) along with the video. The video got over 1000 views in the first four days of launch. We utilized html email blasts, myspace and facebook to help promote the contest.

The contest lasted a month and got 5 submissions. Here’s an archive page that contains some of the submissions from the contest: http://www.playhousesquare.us/spamvideocontest/.

Playhouse Square’s upper management saw the potential in the work we had done with no budget. The non-profit organization committed over $5,000 for a high end digital video camera and an internship to help us continue to do more of these types of videos.