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March 2007 - Strategy Magazine
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Fox's Carmen Schwalm: Mining viral gold
How Fox's Carmen Schwalm managed to get millions of unique online hits and a ton of free PR for two little DVD releases

by Annette Bourdeau
page 21

Lightning doesn't often strike twice. But, in just over a year, Carmen Schwalm, marketing manager at Mississauga, Ont.-based Fox Home Entertainment Canada, spearheaded two wildly successful viral efforts that scored millions of unique hits globally, not to mention over one million free media impressions. Not bad for two DVD releases - TV shows at that.

Schwalm first struck viral gold with the online game "StewieLive" in 2005 to support the launch of the Family Guy special edition DVD "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story." The game, built by Ottawa-based interactive agency Fuel Industries, riffed on Burger King's popular Subservient Chicken model and allowed users to make Stewie do whatever they wanted - from peeing to dancing to killing his mother. It attracted over eight million unique users, surpassing everyone's expectations.

The game wouldn't have happened without Schwalm's tenacious internal steering. "It was a pretty big idea for Canadian budgets. But she figured out how to make it happen," notes Sean MacPhedran, Fuel's director of creative strategy. Schwalm says the Canadian office was relatively easy to get on board. "I sold it by positioning that spend as part of a total media spend. It mitigated the risks," she recalls. "Numbers talk. It's hard to debate results."

But she also needed buy-in from Fox's U.S. office to make the project happen, as she needed to leverage Fox U.S.'s online group and its lawyers to check into rights issues. That was a tougher sell. "I did get a bit of push-back from the U.S.," she says, adding that the onus was on her to prove that "StewieLive" was different from the online efforts the U.S. already had planned. So she made her case, persuasively supporting her claims with ROI projections. "I get annoying if I really believe in something."

"['StewieLive'] really pushed our Stewie release through the roof," notes boss Laura Turner, director of marketing, crediting Schwalm's determination for securing all the necessary internal approvals. "Carmen looped everyone in early on. It was communicating right from the get-go."

Schwalm augmented the "StewieLive" effort with unique guerrilla tactics, including a "Down With Broccoli Tour" (Stewie notoriously hates the vegetable), that entailed Family Guy-related scavenger hunts on university campuses across Canada. She also did a radio contest that let winners attend a special pre-release bar screening of the DVD. "We weren't allowed to screen it at a theatre because it wasn't a movie," says Schwalm, explaining the venue choice.

The success of "StewieLive" made it much easier for Schwalm to sell the next big viral idea Fuel pitched: a "Street Fighter"-inspired multiplayer online game to support the DVD release of the first season of animated sitcom American Dad. The result was "American Dad vs Family Guy."

"It was marrying two properties, knowing they were [aimed at] the same consumer," Schwalm explains. It was a bigger undertaking, but this time Fox U.S. was on board as a partner from the beginning. Again, Schwalm had a big success on her hands: it attracted over two million unique plays within a month of launching.

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