9/26/2009

From True Love to True Blood...

I just got hooked on this really nice TV series called True Blood. The show is about vampires being part of the normal society (yeah, I've always had this thing for vampires ;), due to a newly invented "fake blood" drink, called Tru:Blood, substituting real blood, allowing the vampires to live amongst "normal" people and feed without having to kill their neighbours. When I did some research, it seems that they did a quite massive marketing campaign for the series before it aired.
Picture from hbo.com.

According to Wikipedia, the marketing company created an "viral marketing/alternate reality game" campaign, and they sent out encoded letters to bloggers. They placed "Sorry, we're all out of Tru:Blood"-cards in some beverage vending machine spaces. They also started selling blood orange drinks called Tru:Blood (like in the series) at HBO.com (truebeverage.com), and, not to mention, Vampire jewelry. More about the jewelry at Brandfreak, and more about the campaign at Marketingshift blog, (Marketingshift blog post is from last year, but the series just started airing in Sweden...)

True Blood is starting to be a hype here in Sweden, the series becoming a buzz (since only the 4 first episodes from season 1 have aired) and I really recommend you to watch it. (Check out SVT Play for some of the alreday aired episodes.)