#3 Stolen Nascar (TaxBrain.com) (2006). TaxBrain.com, the online tax preparation service, hired actors to fake the theft of a race car and made it look real, so real that it was picked up and inadvertently aired as a real news story, the subsequent fall-out created a tidal wave of publicity valued at well over 1 million dollars.

Creative: Promoting a tax preparation website can be pretty boring. Marketers behind this stunt wanted to grab attention with something that had never been done before. Their research showed that a NASCAR race car had never been stolen by a racing fan and taxbrain.com did sponsor a NASCAR race car. So using actors, models and stuntmen, they did just that, the winning vehicle was stolen right from the winners circle.

Marketing Objective: The goal was to create off-season brand awareness for TaxBrain.com in a market dominated by two the industry giants: Intuit and H&R Block. They wanted to target the main demographic which is young male and female adults 18-25. This demographic is very at home online, so a viral video was selected as a way to reach this segment. TaxBrain.com hired actors to fake the theft of a race car and make it look real

Results: The story looked so real that San Francisco’s KGO-TV aired this as a real news item. ESPN then picked this up and played it over and over. This was then replayed on all the major networks and the then-16-year-old driver was asked to appear on “Good Morning America”. It is estimated that they received more than $1.8 million in TV time. This spilled over to high website visitor traffic and YouTube viewings.

Although TaxBrain.com produced this viral video exclusively for user-generated video sites such as YouTube.com, the accidental airing as a real news story catapulted this video into one of the great viral marketing successes.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 6:28 am and is filed under Viral Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.