Viral marketing : Sony's Chaalbaaz No.1

Sony Entertainment Television (SET) India tried its hand at Social Media Marketing when it launched its comedy reality show, "Champion Chaalbaaz No. 1". The concept of the show, launched in December 2007, was to get 33 contestants to play the best practical jokes on people. Cyrus Broacha and Saajid Khan hosted the show. Sony wanted to create a buzz on the web about the show by trying to build upon the viral power of the web and making use of user generated content on the web.
The Campaign

On a micro site it developed in-house, Sony invited people to upload videos of pranks that they had played on their friends. Other content on the site included a pranks discussion forum and viral presentations with jokes and pranks. Sony also licensed an animated character developed by Phonethics (the agency behind the campaign) called Mian Fekoo, to create a presence on social media sites. Mian Fekoo created an identity on popular social networking sites such as Orkut and Facebook and uploaded animated videos on over 20 video sharing sites such as YouTube and Metacafe.This was also backed by a blog on which Mian Fekoo wrote about prank ideas and related videos

Now the campaign though a brave and innovative effort in this field doesn't really looks like a success with Sony refusing to quote the page views garnered by microsite and Alexa traffic report of the blog being disappointing. The character MianFekoo has only 68 friends on Orkut out of whom some of them are likely to be agency created Unfortunately the campaign wasn't backed up with enough promotions on the web or an effort to virally promote the blog. The problem grow deeper with the virals on the SetIndia site not even opening in Firefox.
( via Agencyfaqs)