Last month DDB announced it was working with Sky Television to share the text streaming technology Spritz with Kiwis. And the first example of this went live this week in a digital campaign to promote the catch up weekend of True Blood season six on SoHo, before the seventh and final season begins.
Earlier this week we pointed out a billboard for the new True Blood series on Prime. And the folks at DraftFCB and Phantom have sent us even more billboard fodder confirming the adult-orientated humour of the campaign. Sally Willis, Prime’s account director at DraftFCB, says the aim was to shake any teenage preconceptions people held about the show, differentiating it instead as a “raunchy, intense and gritty raw drama”. And as these latest examples from the campaign show, there’s more raunchy humour than you could stab a stake at.
Vampires have been a part of fictionalised culture for some time now. From Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, to the fuzzier Count von Count in Sesame Street, and heroine Buffy the Vampire Slayer, humans seem endeared with the idea of blood sucking creatures roaming the earth. But popular culture seems to now, more than ever, be entranced by the mythology of these fanged creatures. There’s The Vampire Diaries, movie series Twilight and you may have been unfortunate enough to catch the movie preview for, wait for it, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Which is why the folks at DraftFCB are keen to make sure their billboard for the new series of Prime’s True Blood differentiates the show from the rest of the teen-vampire genre.
It used to wander freely and happily, but we rounded it up, put in an enclosed space, turned the lights up to full, force-fed it other news and a host of harmful hormones and then sold it back to you, the unsuspecting consumer. And now we wait for the social media firestorm.