Today I bring you a new Behind The Mark of Odin but varying the tone of the last installments a little. Instead of focusing on the creation of the saga, I started a new series about its launch. It couldn’t be any other way, because this week was the 75th anniversary of the legendary ‘War of the Worlds’ campaign, which influenced me so much, that’s why, as a tribute, today I share this new article with which to bring you closer as was the launch of ‘The Mark of Odin’.
And the master Orson Welles was a great inspiration for me, with that way, so magical and shocking at the same time, of reaching people, ensuring that he continues to be a reference for everyone today. All of you who have seen our #DesastreSevilla launch video will know what I’m talking about. The curious thing is that there are many parallels between the launch of the radio program of ‘The War of the Worlds’ and that of #DesastreSevilla and ‘The Mark of Odin’, although unfortunately the results were not the same.
But before getting into the subject of #SevilleDisaster and ‘The War of the Worlds’, let me give you an introduction to how I approached the launch of ‘The Mark of Odin’. From the very beginning, when I was shaping the universe of the saga, I began to be clear that when it came to launching it it could not be something overnight, but that to achieve the objectives that I had set for myself it would be necessary to carry out hard prior work to prepare the way. He was aware that perhaps a good part of that effort might seem in vain in the short term, but in the long run he was convinced that it would be worth it and that readers would appreciate it.
In this sense there are still many details that I cannot reveal, as they could be a spoiler for many readers, although once the second book comes out I will be able to relax in this sense and reveal many things that until now have only been discovered by a few readers. , the most conscientious in fact. The point is that three years before launching, begin the first phase of preparations to be able to reach D-day with a base ready to work on. This strategy included the creation of several web pages with which to create a solid base in order to strengthen the fiction of ‘The Mark of Odin’.
I have to say that these websites apparently have no relationship with books, although deep down they are directly related. Of course, very few today have realized this. From the second book onwards, his true nature will become more evident to the majority. In the meantime, I will have to let you discover the truth yourself, if you have the appetite to investigate, of course.
If there was one thing clear, it was that for the initial launch it was necessary to make a lot of noise to achieve the greatest possible media impact. Launching a project of these characteristics independently has many handicaps, so one is forced to find ways to attract attention. This is where I return to the influence of Orson Welles and his ‘War of the Worlds’.
For those who do not know the radio program ‘War of the Worlds’ by Orson Welles, tell them that it was a radio program about an alleged invasion of aliens from Mars, broadcast in 1938, and that popular belief says that many people in the United States believed that it was something real.
Today we know that the program actually had a very small audience and that few people listened to it. What happened? Well, the press, which at that time saw the radio as a great enemy that took away advertising revenue, decided to take advantage of that broadcast to make fun of and attack the radio. He did it with the most hostile headlines. The result, without a doubt, was not what was expected. Well, what was achieved was that the program was massively popularized and there was no person in the United States who, when asked, did not claim to have heard it and to have believed that it was a real invasion, even though they had not actually heard it live. Thanks to this media campaign, the program became mythologized and catapulted Orson Welles to success and fame in Hollywood.
The idea with #DesastreSevilla was to achieve something similar, clearly keeping our distance. The first thing was to conceive the production of the video. We didn’t have to go far, in the first book there was a scene that was ideal to achieve the desired effect. It just had to be recreated, although with some changes to make the final result more enigmatic and reveal less of what was happening in the book. To achieve the greatest impact, I brought together a group of more than one hundred people related to the fields of communication and social media in Seville to support the action. The idea was that the video and a press release about the launch would be released, all of them would support during the first minutes what appeared in the video to create a reasonable doubt about its veracity. Obviously, everyone who saw the video would know that it was fiction, but what I was looking for was to get attention.
What happened? Well, like Orson Welles, there were those who took a dim view of this marketing action and the project that ‘The Mark of Odin’ entailed and wanted to sabotage it. A week before having everything ready for the launch, someone from the working group leaked the campaign to another external person, who did not hesitate to leak it to the media in a biased way, avoiding at all times to say that the campaign was based on a video and a communication action.
The result was that El Mundo, ABC and La Razón published news nationwide that a writer from Seville wanted to spread panic, although each one with a different version. Some saying that he was going to put pyrotechnic devices in the river, others that he wanted to simulate a plane crash in the Alamillo park. He had already foreseen a situation like this, but he hoped that if it happened he would already have everything ready, since then it would have been a brutal impact. Unfortunately, neither the website nor the #DesastreSevilla video were finished, so there was no choice but to launch a news item the next day deactivating those that had appeared, alleging that this information was a hoax and that the media had not verified their sources.
The following week, when it was finally launched, it coincided with Mariano Rajoy announcing the VAT increase. Who would have imagined that Wednesday, July 11, would be a hectic media day? Nobody, but there I was watching how all the promised reach in various media vanished as everyone was focused on the increase in the damned VAT.
As you can see, chance can sometimes be very capricious. One can be planning something for years to make sure that everything is tied down to the last detail, that when the moment of truth arrives things can turn out as no one expected. Be careful, this does not have to be negative, the important thing when something unforeseen happens is to know how to react, adapt and take advantage of it. As of today #DesastreSevilla has reached almost 16,000 visits and has allowed ‘The Mark of Odín’ to appear on television channels such as TVE, Telecinco or Cuatro. Something that few independent creators can boast of.
This is where this issue of ‘Behind the Mark of Odin’ ends.
Remember, everything is connected.
Xavier Marcé