Cease-and-desist viral marketing

Over the past few days, news sites & blogs have apparently been dodging C&Ds from Lionsgate legal aimed at getting them to remove leaked "sexy nurse" photos of Scarlett Johannson from the upcoming Spirit movie. My reaction below, taken from a comment I left on another site:

The C&D on Hollywood Newsroom is not from Lionsgate legal. It’s from Special Ops Media, a local (235 Park Avenue South) PR firm that lists as one of its specialties online behavioral marketing.

One of the intuitive principles confirmed by cog-psych research is the appeal of taboo, scarcity and perceived persecution. I can’t think of a better way to co-opt social media than to get folks to think that they’re defying Big Brother. A faux C&D is a way of making people feel that they’re important, that they need to post the pics lest the pics disappear and that promoting the pics–and thereby the film–strikes a blow for human freedom.

Another theme from cognitive research is the way in which the drive to learn and transmit gossip is hard-wired in our brains. Note that the “leaked” pictures were apparently from costume studies, with the actress not smiling and the clothes not quite perfect. It’s imperfect information to which we shouldn’t have access–which makes us want to see it and pass it on.

We’ve already seen this strategy in the Marvel b0y viral, in which the company would seem to have used a fake C&D to create a sense that the site was leaking taboo gossip that could disappear at any moment. For Marvel Boy, the breakdown came, it seems, with the apparent lack of contingency plans for when uncontrolled gossip appeared in the comments thread. My guess is the Spirit marketing strategy might have been a bit more airtight if Special Ops hadn’t IDed itself overtly or included the odd pseudo-legal capitalized phrase “Copyright Infringement Violation,” which is what led me to look ‘em up in the first place.