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September/October 2001
SAM Magazine © 2001 Marketing Bulletin Board. All Rights Reserved.

Pyramid Scheme Unearthed

...The Game of History

When e-tractions approached THC during its "Frontier Homes" campaign with a promise to get high school teachers to use HistoryChannel.com for educational purposes, THC jumped at the opportunity.

e-tractions, which can put together campaigns around formats like rich media brochures, puzzles, surveys, simulations, and others, ran a viral marketing campaign for a few months. It then turned over the front-end to THC to use on their own site (www.historychannel.com/classroom/frontiergame).

How did the campaign play out?
The results were very impressive, according to Michael Gauthier, president of e-tractions: "If [the teachers] came to the site, they signed up and gave THC permission to use their data. Of those who came, enough told their friends to get another 40 percent of new visitors to come on top of the results from the e-mail list. Of visitors who came, almost half pursued the call-to-action to download a study guide from THC's site."...