MAYFLY QUEST

A NEW TAKE ON BOOK MARKETING

For the launch of his first book in the Mayfly series, Jeff, who is also a novelist, decided to instigate a creative book marketing campaign that explored new ways of telling stories and building a following. Most book marketing tends to focus on getting books into the hands of people who weren’t already fans. Jeff sought to reach people who didn’t know they should be fans, drawing heavily on Jeff’s own advertising and PR expertise, his connections in the ad business, and his narrative creativity.

The resulting project, Mayfly Quest, is a social media-driven real-world scavenger hunt that spans the gap between Mayfly and its upcoming sequel, Scorpion. The quest expands upon traditional online scavenger hunts with innovative technology, most notably by hacking Google Maps with 360-degree VR images of Los Angeles landmarks that have been “apocalypsized” to match the futuristic thriller’s setting. The hunt also included radio emergency broadcast signals that built out the Mayfly canon in harrowing detail. The signals, which were promoted on Facebook, had a 74% video completion rate—almost four times the goal.