Influx

NBC has applied some lateral thinking for the promotion of its latest show, The Biggest Loser. These tactics look like they have been borrowed from movie studios and the playbook of Moveon.org, rather than the fairly traditional world of TV marketing.

NBC used TV to drive people to a web site, profiled those who signed up and selected a few individuals to host preview parties.

Using their fans as media, is an intelligent move for NBC, instead of relying on TV promos to spread the word, it will help to accelerate the awareness and hopefully the appeal of the new show.

It’s a great example of “Endo and Exo Marketing”, an idea Influx covered in December 2004. The thinking is based on the work of Didier Soernette, a physicist at UCLA, who did a lot of research into uncovering what made books sell. He discovered two forces that shape success; one he described as the exogenous shock of good book reviews and the other the slow burn of the endogenous shock of positive word of mouth. Influx suggests that brands need to do both to be successful, as is the case here with NBC (using advertising to promote the show, the website and the hosted parties to accelerate word of mouth).