In 2005 Promotion for the Nest began in the form of a Faux movie trailer specifically designed to confuse people into thinking the Nest was a movie when it is in fact a haunted attraction. The Trailer was created using a combination of photos, video and custom created music. The illusion was completed by presenting the trailer in a movie preview style web site. On top of this we promoted a contest pushing people to forward the trailer to their friends in order to sign up to win 2 tickets to the premiere of The Nest. At no time did we ever refer to the Nest as a Movie but we didn't refer to it as an attraction either.

We initially sent out emails to collected lists from the Phoenix, AZ area to promote the trailer and the contest. These emails were again designed to offer the illusion that this was in fact a horror movie trailer. As people visited and viewed the trailer they signed up their friends to visit the trailer as well. Our email list grew by leaps and bounds as a result.

The Press Takes Notice:
Apparently our trailer was pretty convincing because we duped several online Horror Movie news sites into believing that it was a real horror movie trailer. You can see screen shots of these sites to your left. The First is from Dread Central, a major horror news outlet and one of the most trusted. The Second is from HorrorMovies.CA, a Canadian Horror News outlet that picked up on the story Dread Central did. Finally the third is a Dutch Horror News Outlet that picked up on the story. As you can see our Little haunted house trailer made international Horror News.

Unfortunately the Real Nest Haunted House was plagued with location problems and had to delay opening its doors until 2006. However thanks to the emails we were able to collect from our promotion the Nest Opened to a strong numbers in September and those numbers only increased as the weeks wore on.

Viral Marketing:
In addition we created 2 MySpace pages for The Nest. The First promoted the trailer and again was ambiguous as to what the Nest really was. The second was a full blown promotion for The Nest Haunted House. We were able to build up a massive friends list and promote special discounts for certain key weekends at the nest. As a result the nest had a very strong year with good attendance numbers throughout their season.

YouTube, an online video sharing service, was also used as a promotion tool. Viral videos is definitely poised to be the next big thing in marketing and Rogues Hollow Was ready! We converted the trailer we created for The Nest into a video format for YouTube.com and was also able to place the Nest TV commercial on YouTube as well. The Viral gets passed around