Walking to work today, I noticed that a bodega at the corner of West 37th Street and Ninth Avenue had been tagged by some not-so-thrilling graffiti: didyouseethelights.com, spray painted in neat lowercase black letters at eye-level.
I immediately smelled a guerilla marketing campaign and when I got to work, I went to the site. It’s a promotion for the new series, Invasion, and it’s really lame. ABC half-assed what could have been an awesome ramp-up to their show.
First, if you’re gonna go though the trouble of tagging a building, at least give that shit some style.
Second, why couldn’t the web site resemble, say, the “low-tech” personal site or blog of some alleged graffiti artist who had been abducted by aliens (or whatever the premise of this show is). They could have posted shaky lo-res video clips or designed it to mimic a conspiracy theorist’s site, chock full of rants and 1995-style animated GIFs and flashing text. But instead, you’re merely directed to what’s like ABC’s “generic new show template” page, complete with embedded Windows Media format commercial and “Premieres Wednesday, September 21st 10/9c” tag right up top.
A quick Google search shows there’s a separate isawthelights.com site that sort of fits the bill of a conspiracy site, but not really. It still has a prominent banner ad for the show, some obviously Photoshopped “sighting” photos, and no particular flair of the real.
This could’ve been something really cool, particularly if you’re going to go through the trouble of spray-painting buildings in New York City and, according to one blogger’s report, Los Angeles. But the sites don’t live up to the thrill. ABC should take some viral marketing notes from two of last year’s most amazing examples: Burger King’s much-loved Subservient Chicken and the I Love Bees site, which is presently “dead” but last fall was a constantly warping Pattern Recognition-like scavenger hunt that ultimately tied-into Microsoft’s Halo 2 videogame launch.