A reader sent me this the other day. I was hoping to build it into a more complete piece of research, but am finding that time is winding down as I reach my departure date of Friday night. So I’m going to present what he sent to me (hope that’s okay with him), since he did some solid basic research. Hopefully, other people who want to take this up will fill it in with more details.
A friend sent me this link, thinking it was legit. It’s supposedly about someone named Tucker Darby who is investigating the story of Iowa farmer Benjamin Stove, who abandoned his family farm in 1988, leaving behind a mysterious painting of a crop circle.
I did some digging (and so have some folks on the site’s forum), and it turns out the domain is registered to GDM Studios.
GDM has links to Crispin Porter, the group responsible for such viral marketing promotions as the Subservient Chicken.
I can’t find any upcoming movies or TV shows that incorporate the idea of alien abductions and/or crop circles, so I’m not sure *what* they are trying to promote, but it’s interesting.
It is interesting. This Who Is Benjamin Stove website definitely has the same design “feel” as that Chappelle Theory website (see my notes on that here). So I guess this type of thing is some “hot new trend” in marketing or something?
You know what we should do - start making websites like this and doing a lot of whispering about how this site is probably viral marketing and making all these tenuous links to big ad agencies - thus getting it picked up and replicated in the media (at least online). Then cash in! Cha-ching!
It’s funny really, when you think about it: advertisers are learning to be like us, and that makes us excited for some reason. When really, we were us all along, and we should know how to do it better than them to begin with. Anyway, just some food for creative thought. I’d love to see a hundred faux-viral marketing websites crop up after this.
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
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6 Comments
Actually, that may be exactly what the Chappelle Theory site was doing. They’ve since added a disclaimer and a link to some company that sells t-shirts.
http://www.chappelletheory.com/disclaimer.html
http://www.anti-social.com/
It’s not new - plenty of companies have used Alternate Reality Games (games that make themselves feel like reality) as a marketing strategy. (Stella Artois, a videogames company whose name I can’t recall, BBC). ARGN.net is a good resource.
Beautiful.
Good point. I guess I wasn’t saying so much that it’s *new* as it seems to be gaining traction.
I was there a few days ago at the Stove site, for some reason I peged it as marketing very quickly too, but not sure why even, it’s well made for sure, maybe everything seemed a bit too ‘perfect.’ I supose that “thinking it was legit” line is what did it. The site is ’sticky’ and it is spreading well, this may be one of the best viral campaigns yet.
I guessing it’s for a new whisky that’s gonna hit the shelves in a couple months. The crop circles are a chemical model of the drinking kind of alchohol.
Hm, that’s pretty interesting. I guess that would also explain the field of grain, huh? Somebody else suggests beer here:
http://forums.whoisbenjaminstove.com/index.php?showtopic=105
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