Buzz Marketing Gone Wild

[Robert Bermingham]

This may be old news but the orchestrated buzz campaign leading up to the release of the latest Nine Inch Nails Year Zero deserves accolades - in short, it started when fans found that a new Nine Inch Nails tour T-shirt contained highlighted letters that spell out the words "I am trying to believe." It was discovered that iamtryingtobelieve.com was a website that spoke of a vision of dystopian future - also other websites where found in the same IP range were also portraying a similar theme

Soon after a USB key containing an mp3 of a new song from the album was found in the bathroom at a NIN concert in Lisbon, followed by others at other concerts - these quickly found their way around the net

Other files include an mp3 of static that when run through a spectrograph produced an image of 'the presence' which would go on to become the album cover

Now I'm sure the artist in question would consider the whole concept of marketing utterly abhorrent, but you have to give credit where credit is due for harnessing the power of fans for one of the most incredible feats of trans-media planning I've ever seen