It starts with an image, a doodle of two snakes curled around a cane that resembles the caduceus symbol often associated with the medical profession.
That doodle begins popping up around the country.
Chalk graffiti of the symbol appears on buildings in a half-dozen cities. T-shirts bearing the symbol arrive in mailboxes across the country, sent anonymously.
Shoppers at the NBC Experience Store in New York and online receive temporary tattoos of the doodle with their purchases.
The tattoos, shirts and graffiti all direct people to a web site, Snakesonacane.com.
An obvious play on the cheesy 2006 film “Snakes on a Plane,” the site features a man popping open his suit, Superman style, to reveal a t-shirt with the snakes and cane drawing.
The site has a clock counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to an event. As of yesterday, there were 27 days to go.
The big question was what was being counted down to?
The answer, revealed last night on Facebook, was the season premiere of "House," the sixth-year hit medical show on Fox that ended last season on a cliff-hanger in which the cranky doctor, played by Hugh Laurie, was sent off to a mental asylum.
Fox cooked up the alternative media campaign but it was actually Laurie who provided the doodle that was the inspiration behind it. Laurie doodled the snakes and cane one day on the set, and the Fox marketing department saw it and decided to build a campaign for the new season around it.
The doodle makes all the obvious connections: House, the cane he walks with, and the somewhat offbeat brand of medicine he practices.
It’s unusual that an aging show gets such a big push behind it, even one as successful as “House.” Networksusually put their marketing muscle behind new launches at this time of year.
But “House” remains key to the network’s fall schedule, as its highest-rated returning program and one that will be paired with second-year show “Lie to Me” to give it a boost on Monday nights.
And the mystery doodleeffort was some push indeed, with a slew of different alternative media elements. That made it unusual. So did the delayed surprise element. The campaign started in June.
Thousands of stickers were given away both at the NBC store (“House” is produced by Universal Media Studios) and by street teams in 35 cities, including Miami, Atlanta and Seattle.
The chalk graffiti appeared on walls and windows of abandoned buildings in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco.
More than a thousand t-shirts were mailed to media writers and editors, and a teaser 5-second spot featuring Laurie's doodle graphic aired on Fox shows (the one exception being "House").
The network also placed an ad in Entertainment Weekly and planted messages about the logo in online TV communities.
By employing an element of mystery, the campaign succeeded in building buzz for a show that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle of the new TV season.
As it happened, several TV blogs figured out the connection weeks before the actual reveal, but that certainly didn't hurt the campaign, which generated conversations on dozens of web sites, including TVSquad, Yahoo and Amazon, as people tried to figure out what it was all about.
The promotion will continue in the lead-up to “House’s” Sept. 21 premiere, with street teams in wrapped ambulances handing out tattoos in Los Angeles and New York.
