An article about presidential hopeful Ray Hopewood fronts the business section of the San Francisco Chronicle today. Like all presidential contenders these days, Hopewood, a Silicon Valley software mogul, has a web site, Flickr page, friends on MySpace and Facebook and is buying banner ads across the Internet.
The big difference between Hopewood and the other candidates is that he’s a fake. Not just phony in the way that some politicians are, but he’s fictitious. Hopewood is a character played by actor Greg Wrangler and he was dreamed up by an old friend of mine, Barak Kassar, who now heads up his own marketing firm, Rassak Experience. (Way back when, Barak and I tried to eat ourselves silly in various cities where we found ourselves together at conferences — cheesesteaks in Philly, fried green tomatoes in Atlanta, but that’s completely beside the point.)
Hopewood is a cyber-pitchman for enterprise software company BigFix and this is the second offbeat viral marketing campaign that Rassak has launched for the company using Wrangler as a mysterious but seemingly real character. The first effort last fall paid off big time, generating 250,000 visits, 370,000 page views and 1.2 million downloads for BigFix.
This latest effort promises to pay off too — “presidential candidate” Hopewood has generated 45,000 video views in the first two weeks, not to mention 15,000 page views.
The Hopewood campaign is definitely on the edge. As smart as it is, let’s hope that not too many people emulate it because it’s tough enough right now to keep track of real presidential candidates.
Cynthia Brumfield at 11:42 AM|Comments(0)
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