Buy Or Don’t Buy

When I was younger I had a term for the types of things my friends and I enjoyed half-sincerely, half-ironically: The Cult of Awesome. In this Cult of Awesome were, in rough order of Awesomeness: zombies, robots, ninjas and pirates. (Dinosaurs were in there somewhere too, depending on who you ask.) Vampires, however, were not on the list.

Which could be one reason why the new ads for the new HBO show “True Blood” haven’t really bothered me much. (I realize ‘It doesn’t really bother me that much!’ is too middling for this website, but I promise to bring hyperbole soon). From Advertising Age:

Launched quietly May 21, HBO’s campaign for “True Blood” aims to tantalize fans with details about the fall drama’s strange new world, where the development of a synthetic blood product in Japan has allowed vampires to “come out” of their coffins, as it were, with all kinds of cultural ramifications.

I normally hate stuff like this. There’s a lot not to like. The posters are everywhere, which always annoys me because I have a short attention span and need consistent novelty. And I’ve never enjoyed real-life advertisements for fictional products (as opposed to real-life advertisements for real-life products, fictional advertisements for real-life products, or fictional advertisements for fictional products, all of which I love). I like my fantasy and my reality to stay at least a little bit separate. Things like this strike me as a bit silly:

In addition to the commercials, beverage-delivery trucks featuring signs about the product were spotted in New York and Los Angeles, while selected vending machines and delis featured signs telling would-be users that the dispensers and shelves were “sold out” of Tru Blood.

And let’s not deny the unsettling effects of statements like this:

The hope is that hard-core fans who get wrapped up in the various stories and promotions then start to talk about it to others.

[Shit.]

But as an aspiring serious-sci-fi-with-grand-long-form-narrative-TV-writer myself (”The Wire” meets “Battlestar Galactica” with bits of “Rome” and “Mad Men” thrown in. It’s gonna be brilliant, you heard it here first!) I’m sympathetic to the HBO executives faced with taking a chance on Alan Ball’s grand sprawling vision without knowing for sure that it won’t be “John From Cincinnati” instead of “Deadwood”. As AdAge says:

The complex and multifaceted ad campaign illustrates the challenges TV networks face as they start to roll out dramas with long, overarching storylines set in strange new milieus that require a lot of explanation.

Bully for you, I guess, marketing team. The ads are enticing and show a lot of creativity and originality. No complaints here.

But like I said up top, vampires were never really my thing. No, my thing was zombies. I was partly forced into it - ninjas were a little mainstream-geeky, pirates were just plain mainstream, robots too boring, my friends had already enthusiastically claimed dinosaurs - but mostly I genuinely enjoyed them. I liked the way zombies are pretty much fuckups: they’re slow, they’re dumb and they’re basically harmless if you’re more than 10 feet away from them. The only way to kill them is a shotgun to the head. That’s pretty cool.

So when a fellow BoDB-er sent me a link to a site called ZombieHarmony, (No, I’m not gonna link it) I thought it seemed pretty funny. Zombies dating is an inherently comedic premise:

But the site was suspiciously low on content. I smelled a zombie-rat. When I tried to actually use the site (a fast-moving zombie searching for a very rotten slow-moving zombie interested in gnawing), there weren’t any actual results, just a link “Not a zombie? Click here.” I was being stealth-marketed towards, by Mingle^2, a 100% Free Dating Site (!).

I didn’t mind the suggestion that zombie fans need to go online to find dates. I only minded a little that my adolescent interests are so common that in some building somewhere, someone’s salary depended on appealing to them. What I didn’t like about this campaign was how shallow it was. Geekery is in the details. Nerds like diving deep down into our subcultures, that’s why “Watchmen” and “The Dark Knight” are so popular. If you’re going to try to appeal to them, you can’t do it half-assed. Take some lessons from the True Blood people, Mingle^2, and put some effort into your ridiculous ads.

Or, you could just have people say funny things in British accents: