Be warned:
'Vampire lair discovered'
So reads a large billboard at a construction site
By Toni Fitzgerald
Sep 17, 2009
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Sometimes in alternative media it’s all about taking advantage of what’s already out there. It just takes a bit of imagination.
In this case, we're talking about a giant hole in the ground at an abandoned construction site.
What do you do with it?
Put up a billboard announcing that construction was halted after it was discovered that the hole was, yes, a vampire lair.
“On hold,” says the sign in white capital letters, followed by, “Vampire lair discovered,” in red. A white arrow points below, toward the abandoned site. Smaller letters note, “Sorry for the inconvenience.”
The sign was the idea of a New Zealand agency to promote the launch of “True Blood,” the hit HBO show, when it began airing on the Prime network in late summer.
“Prime likes to do things a little differently than the mainstream networks with their homogenized program offerings. They want to entertain people everywhere possible – including their ads,” says Jane Wardlaw, an account director at DraftFCB who worked on the campaign.
Like so much of the world, Auckland City, N.Z., has been hit by the recession.
One of the effects has been that construction on a new retail site in the city was abandoned mid-job, leaving that humongous hole in the ground surrounded by fences.
That was the official story. The big black sign in front of the site suggests the alternative, more intriguing reason.
And if you look closer, you see it's really a promotion for the TV series.
The “Blood” logo appears in the lower left part of the billboard, with the program’s debut date and Prime’s logo on the right.
The idea came about as part of a greater theme for the show’s launch. The core idea was “vampires amongst us,” which prompted the agency to think of all the ways vampires could be integrated into society.
Prime wanted something cheeky that would get the show noticed, and doing something based on a famous victim of the recession seemed like a perfect fit.
“The billboard we used had been posted by the property developers (rather than a media company), who had long since run out of money, hence the giant hole in the ground,” Wardlaw says.
“We rang them up and asked them if we could use the billboard for a month. With their permission we printed a skin and arranged install, and threw them some cash.”
The creative went up on Aug. 21 for a six-week run. Since then pictures of the billboard and a few others featured in the “Blood” campaign have run in the New Zealand Herald, the country’s biggest daily newspaper, and the billboard has popped up on dozens of advertising and marketing blogs worldwide.
Wardlaw says the show launched well and ratings have been increasing since then.
Perhaps most important, the campaign informed people not just about “Blood’s” launch but about Prime’s attitude, an important part of its branding. That’s why the vamp lair was an effective idea.
“Prime is a small TV channel here and is I guess what you’d call a challenger brand,” Wardlaw says. “Every time we come up with campaign ideas, the aim is to get noticed, with attitude that the bigger networks would never go for.”
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