For the past month, McKinney Silver’s viral campaign for Oasys Mobile has been bandied about in the bloatosphere.
Here we have a clear case of mainstream media following blogs to the story.
Oasys, based in Raleigh, N.C., enlisted the advertising firm McKinney & Silver, in Durham, N.C., to introduce its brand inexpensively — with a nontraditional campaign that it hoped would grab the attention of its desired 18-to-24-year-old demographic.
“You have a brand that nobody knows what it is and you have a consumer that’s very specific,” said David Baldwin, the executive creative director at McKinney, a unit of Havas. “They don’t engage in traditional marketing. But they live online and they live with their cellphones.”
The Times reports that the character blog in question now receives 10,000 visits a day, placing it among the top 10% of blogs worldwide. If those numbers are accurate, we better brace oursevles for more of the same.