Advertising Hoaxes

Wanted: Girl Who Knits — Speaking of truth in advertising (see post below), I'm not sure that it pays to be as truthful as this personal ad on Craigslist is:

Will marry girl who knits
Reply to: [email protected]
Date: Wed Jan 05 07:25:22 2005
I will buy you a ring and propose to you if you can make one of these for me. I want to look silly during the winter.

But then again, he may just find the girl of his dreams.

Truth in Real Estate Advertising — My wife and I are recreational open house attendees, so I'm very familiar with all those euphemisms real-estate agents use to describe really bad homes: 'fixer upper', 'needs work', 'starter home'. Here's an amusing case of a guy who managed to get an offer on his apartment by using the opposite technique: brutally honest advertising. He advertised his place as a "Gruesome two-room apartment with balcony... a very worn-out apartment." (Thanks, Gary)

Was the Forehead Ad Auction a Hoax? — Adrants reports on an interesting rumor. The recent forehead-ad auction on eBay may have been a hoax. Andrew Fischer, the guy who successfully auctioned his forehead for $37,375, seems to have had connections to SnoreStop (the company that won the auction) long before the auction occurred. Apparently he went to college with the daughter of SnoreStop's CEO... and the two of them colluded to pull off this pr stunt. The rumor has the ring of truth to it, because as Adrants says:

This entire thing was very iffy and scammy and media savvy, they even had a PR firm ready to give out photos in a jiffy. Who arranged all this to happen with such magic speed?

Plus, the idea of selling ad space on your forehead was hardly new. It had been done before, even on eBay. So it puzzled me why this guy in particular received so much attention. If it were all a carefully organized pr stunt, that would explain why.

The Tape — She-is-here.com and its companion site, the-tape.com, seem to be fairly obvious marketing attempts to 'blairwitch' the upcoming sequel to the horror movie, The Ring (i.e. to create hoax websites to generate interest about it). But still, I've received a couple of worried emails from people who have watched 'the tape' and are a little concerned, so I thought I should post something about it. As far as I know, no stringy-haired decomposing girl is going to crawl out of a well and kill you if you watch the tape. Though I'm playing it safe. I made my wife watch the tape. She then made the cat watch it. My cat is the one posting this message (she hit the mouse button with her paw to click submit), so if any one of you watches 'the tape' she'll be safe.

Advertise On My Pregnant Belly — So where will this trend end? We've had head-vertising, ass-vertising, and tadoos (okay, tadoos were a hoax). So it shouldn't be any surprise that one woman is pioneering pregnant-belly-vertising on eBay. Is there any part of the body that advertisers won't pay to plaster their message on? Probably not. But is this woman going to walk around with her belly showing? Even if it's cold outside? It is Winter, after all.

The Emancipator Bubble — Even though I'm not very proficient in Spanish, I'm pretty sure that the Emancipator Bubble is a hoax. According to the machine translation, the Emancipator Bubble "is an inflatable cockpit, with bubble form, that allows you independent living without leaving the familiarity of your house." In other words, it's a large inflatable bubble that you live in, instead of just living in your room. It comes in various models, such as the Sexmancipator. This racy model is "Made with a plastic similar to the latex and with an interior permanently lubricated. It incorporates a small vibrating motor. It is totally soundproof towards the outside." I think the concept of the Emancipator Bubble is a marketing concept dreamed up by a bubble gum company. (via We Make Money Not Art)

Volkswagen Polo Ad — Check out this ad for the Volkswagen Polo (link may be dead) that's been going around. A suicide bomber blows himself up inside the car, but the car is so tough that it contains the explosion. Seems to push the envelope a bit too much to be an actual ad commissioned by Volkswagen, and sure enough it's not. It's a 'spec ad', created by leeanddan.com. Spec ads are 'speculative ads' created to show potential clients what kind of work you're capable of doing. In other words, Volkswagen never endorsed this material.
Update (1/20/05): The Guardian reports that they were able to track down Lee of leeanddan.com, who did indeed make the VW Polo ad. Lee says that he wasn't working for Volkswagen, but implies that he made the ad to get Volkswagen's attention. Reportedly the ad cost £40,000 to make.

Forehead Ad Blocker — Hot on the heels of the latest guy who was auctioning off advertising space on his forehead, comes this eBay entrepreneur who has invented Forehead Ad Blockers.

there is a new type of advertising that is rapidly gaining ground: forehead advertising. These ads will be inescapable, especially if you have to visually interact with that soulless human posing as a walking billboard. That is, unless you have: The Forehead Ad Blocker™
Portable! No heavier than a standard pair of safety glasses!
Adjustable! Blocks forehead ads regardless of their height! Just raise or lift your head!
Patent-pending technology!

(via Adrants)

FARTFULL Work Bench — I realize that Ikea gives some of their products strange names. At least, the names sound strange in English. In Swedish I'm sure that they sound perfectly normal. But you would think that somebody in the company would have realized that calling a children's work bench the 'FartFull' wasn't the most astute marketing move. Though kids will probably like the name. I'm pretty sure this isn't a joke because the product is right there on Ikea's website.

Coca-Cola Fantasy Items — Here's an interesting piece from a newspaper about the burgeoning market in Coca-Cola Fantasy items. One of the paper's readers wrote in to ask whether their Coca-Cola belt buckle designed by Tiffany Studios and showing a nude woman sitting on a crescent moon was of any value (unfortunately there's no picture of the item). The paper's reply: No, because the item is a fantasy fake:

[This] is what Coca-Cola collectors call a "fantasy," which is a piece that never existed as an old item, was not used in advertising by the Coca-Cola Co. (nor sanctioned by them), but is a modern creation meant to appeal to collectors or to mislead the unwary. There are literally tons and tons of these Coca-Cola "fantasy" items out there, lurking in flea markets and at garage sales. The variety seems to be endless, and belt buckles are one of the favorite items to be made as "fantasies," and many of them feature nude women, including one extremely tasteless and offensive example that has the representation of a nude nun of all things!

Nude Nun Coke memorabilia. I may be twisted, but for some reason that seems more interesting to me than the authentic Coke stuff.

Joey the Midwife — Joey the Midwife is an advertising agency. An unbelievably cheap advertising agency. How can it offer such low rates? Simple. "Here's our secret: We have developed the use of "themes" to sell products. Why reinvent the wheel with every ad campaign? We've got a collection of themes that are PROVEN winners.... themes everyone loves. We just plug your product into a theme and PRESTO BINGO, you've got a world-class ad campaign at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time." It's a very strange little site. I think it's the creation of cartoonist David Rees, author of Get Your War On, since a lot of the links lead back to his site. But I'm not sure why Rees created the site.

Afro Ninja — Here's a video of a guy trying out for a part in an action movie... but things don't go well for him at all. The guy performs so badly that you'd suspect the scene was staged, but apparently it's a real audition tape. Waxy.org did some detective work and discovered that the man in the video seems to be stuntman Mark Allen Hicks, and the video shows him auditioning for a Nike commercial with Allen Iverson and Jim Kelly. Reportedly Hicks left the audition with a bloody nose, and the next few stuntmen who auditioned were told not to do any flips.

Coke vs. Pepsi — According to the Independent, researchers have proven that the difference between Coke and Pepsi really is all in your head. Apparently the popularity of Coke's brand image causes people to think Coca-Cola itself tastes better, even though it really doesn't taste very different from Pepsi. As the article says: "When asked to taste blind, they showed no preference. However, when the participants were shown company logos before they drank, the Coke label, the more famous of the two, had a dramatic impact: three-quarters of the tasters declared they preferred Coke." I've long suspected this. Personally I can't taste any difference between Coke and Pepsi, but I have a friend who swears passionately that there's a huge difference. Now I can show him this research to prove that he's simply been brainwashed by advertising. Oh, and the Pepsi Taste Test also turns out to be nothing but hot air: "The findings suggest there is no scientific basis for claims made during the Pepsi ad campaign in which testers purportedly chose Pepsi over Coke when they were not told what they were drinking."

Marijuana Mobile — Peptalk seems to be positioning itself as the mobile phone service provider of choice for Dutch marijuana lovers. Check out its website, pepyouraddiction.nl, where you can see that its corporate logo is a hemp plant. Marijuana is, of course, legal in Holland... and PePtalk is a Dutch company, but the weird thing is that beyond that PePtalk doesn't seem to have any rational connection to marijuana. It's as if they just liked the idea of being a pot-lover's phone company... without offering pot lovers any benefit from choosing their service over another. As this article at Strand Reports notes: PePtalk do not actually seem to express any views on cannabis on their website - other than their name and logo. And although they offer many premium rate SMS services, none of them seem to have anything to do with daily cannabis prices - or where you can locate your nearest cannabis coffee shop!  But maybe that is in the pipeline?

JDate Personal Ads — Banner ads for JDate, the Israeli dating service, promise to match Jewish bachelors up with attractive Jewish women. For instance, one ad shows blonde-haired, 22-year-old Hila from Tel Aviv who's "looking for a single Jewish guy." Another shows 26-year-old Sharon who's looking for a Jewish husband. But as it turns out, there is no Hila from Tel Aviv. The woman in the picture is actually Hungarian porn star Kari Gold. And Sharon? She's really Devon Sweet, a bisexual model from the United States. Neither Kari Gold nor Devon Sweet are affiliated in any way with JDate (so no luck meeting them that way). Their pictures were just randomly collected on the internet. I guess this is another shocking reminder that advertisers sometimes bend (or completely disregard) the truth.

Life With Skippy — From the Hoax Forum: Ever heard of Life With Skippy? It was an American television show that aired briefly in 1969 that featured "the misadventures of two small-town boys, the trouble-making Skippy and his sidekick Gummy." Unfortunately it got cancelled after only six episodes. Still don't remember it? Well, if you look around the internet you can find a surprising number of references to this hard-to-remember show. It's mentioned on message boards, there's a Yahoo Group devoted to its young star (who was later found dead in a brothel), there's a Life With Skippy website, and a website maintained by the actor Adam Felber who played Gummy. Plus, you can buy the hat worn by Skippy on eBay. Well, if you still can't remember the show the reason is that it never existed. It's the creation of a New York-based production company, Metropolis Entertainment, who are trying to promote a new sitcom they've developed called Life After Skippy, which is about the career of a down-on-his-luck former child actor (who once supposedly worked on Life With Skippy). Quite an elaborate guerrilla marketing campaign they've put together for this. You can view clips from the real show, Life After Skippy, on their site. Some of them are pretty funny.

Manchurian Global — At first glance, Manchurian Global looks like any other faceless corporation. Its website is full of corporate jargon about mission statements, international client bases, and holistic visions. But, of course, Manchurian Global isn't a real corporation. Its site is part of the advertising campaign for The Manchurian Candidate, which opens today. The illusion of reality that the site maintains is actually quite convincing. They've really made it look like a real company. Only until you dig far into the site do you arrive at suspicious stuff, such as a video showing one of their scientists, Dr. Atticus Noyle, talking about how they can control people's personalities at a genetic level. Paramount has been running an ad on my site for The Manchurian Candidate for the past two weeks, which I thought was pretty cool since I've always liked the original 1962 version of the movie starring Frank Sinatra. I'm hoping the new version can live up to the original.

BlondeStar — A lot of people have the OnStar system in their car that lets them connect to an operator to get 24-hour roadside assistance. BlondeStar is the same thing, just designed specifically for blondes. More of a blonde joke (or spoof advertisement) than a hoax, but amusing anyway, unless you're incredibly offended by blonde jokes. (links to an mp3 file... click the download button)

Swedish Anti-Smoking Campaign — The Swedish anti-smoking activist group A Non Smoking Generation has plastered posters all over Stockholm that make claims such as 'smoking stunts penis growth,' 'cigarette filters are filled with mouse excrement,' and 'second-hand smoke kills birds.' The problem is that none of these claims are acually true. But the group figures that the outrageousness of the claims might entice a few people to visit their website to learn the real facts. This once again demonstrates one of the central principles upon which the advertising industry was founded: if you can't get their attention by telling the truth, then get it by telling a lie.

Blairwitching and the Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan — Five years ago the Blair Witch Project became a multi-million dollar box-office sensation thanks to a clever marketing scheme that pretended the Blair Witch was real (and offered a spooky companion website filled with pseudo historical background about her). Ever since then movie marketers have latched onto the concept of promoting movies via hoaxes. So much so, that I think we should just begin referring to the practice of promoting movies by hoaxing the public as 'Blairwitching'. For instance, a sample sentence using this term might be: Failing to think of any original way to promote their movie, the marketing team simply decided to Blairwitch it.

The latest movie to be Blairwitched is the Sci-Fi Channel's documentary about filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan (The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan) that aired last night. The Sci-Fi Channel's marketing team promoted the movie by promising that it was going to reveal a secret buried in Shyamalan's past, a secret that had driven him towards his obsession with the supernatural. Supposedly Shyamalan didn't want this secret exposed, which caused him to stop cooperating with the documentary team. This conflict between Shyamalan and his biographers managed to garner a fair bit of press. But then yesterday, when the documentary aired, the Sci-Fi Channel admitted that they simply invented Shymalan's buried secret as well as Shyamalan's disagreement with them (the big secret was supposed to be that he once witnessed a drowning).

I like the line in this article about the hoax campaign where NBC executives (NBC owns the Sci-Fi Channel) apologize, saying that "We would never intend to offend the public or the press and value our relationship with both." Yeah, right. Meanwhile, they're happy to accept all the publicity that the hoax generated (including having people like me write about it on their weblogs). And oh yeah, the hoax itself and the documentary were ultimately all big advertisements for Shyamalan's upcoming movie The Village, which actually looks kind of cool. (Thanks to Terry in the hoax forum for giving a heads up about this)