Advertising Hoaxes

Where Is My Gnome — Bill has lost his garden gnome. Someone stole it from his lawn. Now he's hoping that you can help him find it. There's even a 1-800 number you can call if you have any info, but Dani, who told me about the site, reports that if you call the number "a nervous sounding man asks you to leave a message if you have information about his gnome, then before the beep, he says 'Mom, if this is you, hang up now.'"

What Brand Are You? — This is one of those cases where a joke supposedly becomes reality. An advertising company (The Design Conspiracy) created a joke website called What Brand Are You?, whose purpose was to spoof the bizarre brand names that companies are increasingly dreaming up—names such as Aviva, Diageo, and Corus. Visitors to What Brand Are You could type in their name, their 'core values,' and their goals, and the supercomputer powering the website would then spit out a personalized brand name free of charge (my brand name is 'Acclivius'). In reality, the Design Conspiracy had just dreamed up a few silly names (about 150, they say) which were randomly offered when visitors hit the submit button. But apparently a number of companies liked the spoof names, because according to this BBC story twenty of them have now been registered as trademarks (Thanks to Andrew Nixon for sending in this link). Some of the spoof names that are now the brand names for real companies include Bivium, Libero, Ualeo, Winnovate, and Tempero.

The folks at the Design Conspiracy claim to be somewhat taken aback by all this... But the weird thing is that the companies who registered the spoof names all say that they've never heard of the What Brand Are You website. So something smells a little fishy. The skeptical part of me suspects that the Design Conspiracy might have slipped a few existing names (that they thought were silly) in with the fake names. Now they're enjoying the publicity of having their spoof names supposedly adopted by real companies. I could be being overly skeptical, of course, but 20 names out of 150 seems like a suspiciously high hit rate. This suspicion would seem to be confirmed when a simple search on whois.org reveals that the What Brand Are You site was registered on June 11, 2002, whereas the domain name for the Bivium Group (just to pick the first of the spoof/real names) was registered before this on May 22, 2002. In other words, the brand name Bivium existed before the Design Conspiracy listed it as a spoof name on their website. The pool of spoof names was seeded with real names.

My Son Peter — Here's a spooky site. It's called 'My Son Peter.' I'll use the text from the site itself to describe it: "My son Peter has always loved to play hide and seek. In fact, he loves it so much that he will wake me up in the middle of the night to play. The only problem is that Peter has been dead for eight years. This website documents the hell I've lived and continue to live every night." It's a fairly simple site, and it doesn't look like it's been updated for quite a while, so maybe Peter has discontinued his hauntings. But it does have a ghost video of Peter that's worth checking out. (Oh, and apparently the site was created by an advertising agency called Yarnbird that specializes in viral content).

Skyhigh Airlines — Here's a new hoax website that's making the rounds: Skyhigh Airlines. It's motto is 'Flying More. Caring Less.' I love their Challenge Seating Innovation. You fight with other passengers for the seat you want. Also check out the list of cities they fly out of. Where else can you get a roundtrip ticket from Araz Stage Stop, CA to Smeltertown, TX? The site appears to have been created by Alaska Airlines, as part of a new humor-themed advertising campaign. There are accompanying TV and radio ads for Skyhigh Airlines (that reveal themselves to be ads for Alaska Airlines before they're over).

False Advertising — Fark.com is running a contest to photoshop ads that use false advertising. There are a few amusing entries, such as 'Spam: 100% Pure Meat.'

Outhouse Springs Water — Stuart Elliott, in today's edition of his NY Times email newsletter, writes about a hoax product that recently became a real product. It goes by the name Outhouse Springs water. This brand of bottled water was dreamed up by an advertising agency that wanted to gauge how effective outdoor billboard ads could be. So they put 40 billboards advertising the fictitious Outhouse Springs Water up around Charleston, South Carolina. The billboards sported slogans such as "It's #1, not #2!" People definitely noticed the ads and actually started asking for the stuff at retailers. Demand became so intense that the ad agency eventually made a deal with a bottled-water company to produce a limited run of Outhouse Springs Water. It's on sale now at Piggly Wiggly's in Charleston. This product reminds me of Olde Frothingslosh Pale Stale Ale.

The Cesky Sen Hypermarket — How do people react when their expectations built up by advertising collide with reality? That was the question two Czech film students set out to answer. They flooded Czech media with advertisements for a new 'hypermarket'—Cesky sen— offering goods at rock-bottom prices. New TV sets for $19, for instance. Eager shoppers flooded to the hypermarket's address, shopping bags in hand, only to find a large empty scaffold bearing a banner fluttering aimlessly in the wind. (Story via Paul Farrington)

Hunting for Bambi — It looks like it's now 100% official that Hunting for Bambi was a hoax.

Hunting for Bambi (hopefully final update) — So I think it's finally official that Hunting for Bambi is a hoax, a publicity stunt done to sell videos. Isn't it wonderful that public attention gets focused on things like this rather than, oh, poverty, hunger, education, etc.?

Hunting for Bambi Update — It's looking more and more like Hunting for Bambi is a hoax. George Evanthes, the man who claimed to have paid to go on a Bambi hunt, is now being denounced as a shill by his friends. And the Hunting for Bambi company is claiming that it can no longer hold any Bambi Hunts because all the potential customers have been scared away by negative publicity. Seems like a convenient excuse.

More about Hunting for Bambi — Suspicions that Hunting for Bambi is a hoax seem to be growing. If the company is for real then it should be easy enough for them to prove it. Show that you're signing people up for new 'hunts.' Produce the accounting records to prove that you've taken people's money for hunts in the past. But of course they won't do that. These hoaxes always work the same way. Stall and delay for as long as possible while you milk the controversy for all the publicity you can get. KLAS-TV, the Las Vegas station that originally aired the story, discovered that the company behind Hunting for Bambi, only has a business license that allows it to sell videos, not to operate a sexually-oriented business nor to run paintball games. So if they are actually doing this, they're doing it without the proper licenses.

Hunting for Bambi — Is 'Hunting for Bambi' a hoax? In case you somehow missed it (hiding under a rock, or something), Hunting for Bambi is supposedly a company that for $10,000 will let guys hunt naked women with a paintball gun in the desert outside of Las Vegas. The company got some local TV coverage, and then the larger news outlets picked up on the story, initiating a media frenzy. But based on the emails I've been getting, a lot of people are suspicious about the company's claims. After all, exactly how does one sign up to go on one of these Bambi-hunting expeditions? That doesn't seem to be clear since the company isn't responding to most inquiries. What I would guess is that there are no Bambi-hunting trips. That would involve just too many legal problems. But the company is offering a video for sale, and members of the public can definitely buy that. I suspect that the company is just pretending to offer the 'hunts' as a way to generate a lot of publicity and sell the video (and the other merchandise they're offering). The whole scheme is reminiscent of something like Ron's Angels, which got a lot of publicity back in 1999 because it claimed to be selling the eggs of supermodels to infertile couples. That all turned out to be a hoax to promote a pornographic web site. I could be wrong about Hunting for Bambi, but I'll wait for them to provide more evidence of the truth of their claims before I change my mind.

Antennalopes — If you go to the movies this summer, you just might be lucky enough to see footage of this intriguing tall-tale creature: the Antennalope. These creatures (antelopes with antennae on their heads) are "bred to instantly relay radio signals as they frolic." They constantly roam the country in herds, instinctively migrating to where radio signals are weakest, thus helping to make possible a truly mobile national phone network. The antennalopes are featured in ads for Nextel that play before movies. They appear to be related to the Jackalope.

Heineken Hoax Campaign — Heineken invites you to create your own hoax.

National Blonde Day — Oops. I forgot that yesterday was National Blonde Day, so designated by the Blonde Legal Defense Club. The day is designed to promote respect for the intelligence and accomplishments of blondes. In reality, it's a publicity stunt for the Legally Blonde movie.

Misleading Ad — Here's another case of the underlying reality of what an ad is showing being out of sync with the message the ad is trying to deliver. A Canadian campaign commercial shows a shot of a smiling family accompanied by a voice over that says, "I want a premier who believes what I believe." But the family shown is an American family from Oregon. Oops.

Spoof Ads — The Globe and Mail argues that many of the spoof ads going around recently are actually inside jobs created by the companies being spoofed.

Subliminal Advertising in Russia — The LA Times reports that subliminal advertising is still widely used in Russian ads, even though the whole concept was revealed to be a hoax back in the 1960s. (Requires registration).

I Am Turok — Here's a strange publicity stunt: a London company is seeking five people who are willing to officially change their name to Turok for one year. These people will then be walking, talking billboards helping to spread the word about the X-Box game called 'Turok: Evolution.'

The Case of the Keyspan Ad — Another case of a hoax photo. The KeySpan Corp. ran an ad showing some Long Island fishermen in order to show its deep ties with the Long Island community. The only problem was that the picture of the fishermen was actually taken in Seattle, which was obvious since they were holding up King Salmon, which aren't found around Long Island.