The Mystery of Dalarö

The Mystery of Dalarö was the title of a promotional campaign launched by Volvo in early 2004. It was considered an unusual way, at the time, to promote the launch of the new Volvo S40 using a documentary-style video approach. The 8 minutes long hoax film credited to (fictitious) Venezuelan filmmaker Carlos Soto – in reality, as was disclosed later, it was directed by Spike Jonze – deals with the fact that on 25 October 2003 32 people supposedly purchased a Volvo S40 at the same local Volvo dealership in Dalarö, a small village to the south-east of Stockholm. In addition to this film a 4 minutes long documentary-of-the-documentary calling into question the validity of the events was posted as Soto's "personal edit" on his alleged homepage.

The campaign gained lots of interest in advertising industry as well as in automotive industry. Many chat-rooms activities were created to discuss this topic. In Switzerland the campaign is now used as a business case model for 360-campaigning using the mobile phone as main media.

See also

• Viral marketing

External links

• The Mystery of Dalarö on YouTube
• Carlos Soto's ostensible homepage (via the Internet Archive)
• The Spoof within a spoof (Kept tabs on the spread of the viral and full press release)
• The Truth behind The Mystery of Dalarö (press release)
• Detailed presentation of results (in German)