Comments on: Comments on 2697

Post number 2697

jkottke — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 08:13:49 -0800

Rubberburner.com has been making the rounds via email and weblog, as has supergreg.com. They both look a little too "perfect" to be true, don't they? Turns out they're both carefully crafted ad sites, designed to sell us Lee jeans. Will we be seeing more of the Mahir ad model? I wonder how they went about spreading it initially....

By: mimi

mimi — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 08:26:33 -0800

Supergreg is registered to Fallon, who brought us "Dick," the best Miller Lite spokesman EVAH. Good work!

By: jsapn

jsapn — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 08:29:49 -0800

You know, I hate to say it, but building a web tie-in for an ad campaign like this might actually work. Of course, it remains to be seen what they're gonna be selling (well, jeans, yes, but specifically) and how they're gonna follow through.

By: Tubes

Tubes — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 08:43:40 -0800

WhoIs confirms both sites are registered to Fallon. Jason, where'd you get the info that it's a Lee Jeans campaign?

By: Tubes

Tubes — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 08:44:47 -0800

Whoops. Never mind. Buddylee.com just finally finished loading in another window & I see what's up...

By: mathowie

mathowie — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 08:58:56 -0800

Is it just me or does every photo at the supergreg.com site look doctored to enhance supergreg's uni-brow?

By: jkottke

jkottke — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 08:59:25 -0800

Yeah, Lee has been a client of Fallon's for years.

By: deckard

deckard — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 10:30:37 -0800

Well I've seen the commercial with Super Greg challenging Buddy Lee many times, but I havent seen Curry anywhere yet.

By: the webmistress

the webmistress — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 11:09:51 -0800

You mean that Curry, the slim and handsome Italian race car driver with terra-cotta Fabio locks that I dream about every night, isn't real? I've given that leather-wearing poser three links on my weblog. This is rich.

By: EssenDreck

EssenDreck — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 11:17:57 -0800

I'm not a webmaster, but I play one on my web site. Where is Jean Baudrillard when we need him?

By: Dean_Paxton

Dean_Paxton — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 11:54:14 -0800

> > I wonder how they went about spreading it initially.... > I think that I first saw Curry on cruel.com, then stileproject.com made a remark or two about them, the supergreg popped up on some weblogs. The rest just snowballed, very quickly too. Like within the last three weeks. Anyway, my hat is off... brilliant work. I don't think this will be the end by any means. We better figure a way to deliver the billions and trillions of dollars in internet revenues to "Tha Man." Because banner ads are just not cutting it anymore.

By: sixfoot6

sixfoot6 — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 12:16:54 -0800

I agree that banner ads aint cuting it anymore. But do we really want advertising to blend into artistic and personal sites so well that we can't tell the difference anymore? Both the Curry and Super Greg sites are hilarious, and humorous advertising never bothers me much, no matter how it's presented. But I worry about crafty marketing schemes weaseling their way into content, be it in a website, a movie, or a TV show.

By: baylink

baylink — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 12:19:50 -0800

Ok, so it's good. Is it bad? My outlook on this sort of thing is: *somewhere* on the site, admit it's an ad, and have a sense of humor about the whole thing, and I'll be impressed. You're allowed to hide it a *little*: if I don't get the joke, it wasn't *for* me... Otherwise, you're a shithead.

By: baylink

baylink — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 12:33:28 -0800

No interesting comments in the source, but you *did* notice that Fallon McElligott has good taste in HTML creation programs, right?

By: Dean_Paxton

Dean_Paxton — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 13:12:40 -0800

Also, here's another one: Born to Destroy

By: rcade

rcade — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 13:16:40 -0800

I like the hoaxes that never admit they are hoaxes, personally.

By: bradlands

bradlands — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 13:26:22 -0800

Egads...what if Matt's been having us on all this time, and MeFi is a hoax? (Admittedly, Zach and Eric are pretty hard to believe at times, and don't even get me started on WWWendall. But I'd be a bit distraught to discover that I too am a fictional construct, soon to be caught shilling for the Gap or somesuch. :-))

By: sylloge

sylloge — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 13:53:38 -0800

The Gap, eh? Isn't pretty obvious by this point that the whole "weblog" thing is construct of the CafePress and PayPal Consortium (CPPPC)? Nice attempt at a distraction though.

By: wendell

wendell — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 14:13:46 -0800

Curses, they've figured me out, and mere hours before I was going to start cashing in with the "Babe the Singing Bar-B-Q Baby Back Ribs" t-shirt... You think I'm kidding... you know I'm not kidding... you're going to go visit oneswellfoop.com TOMORROW (8/3) to see if I'm kidding... BTW, the name's WWWWendEll... WWWWendall is the webmaster for Arrested Development's fan site...

By: sixfoot6

sixfoot6 — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 14:57:15 -0800

Shame on you, Matt, for fabricating thousands of MeFi users just to try to trick me into buying a mug or T-shirt.

By: aaron

aaron — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 23:03:02 -0800

I think we've all been looking at these sites backwards. My guess is Fallon only intended for people to access these sites from the Lee page(s). But one or two people went to buddylee.com, saw Curry et al, send the links without proper explanation to a few mailing lists or newsgroups, and away the meme went.

I mean, even as k3wl ads, it just doesn't make any sense to have pages with absolutely no information on the page about the product you're plugging.

By: aaron

aaron — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 23:08:23 -0800

By the way, I just learned that Anti-Porn is actually an ad for Monistat 7.

By: jkottke

jkottke — Thu, 03 Aug 2000 07:39:56 -0800

Wired News has an article on this, with quotes from this thread.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Thu, 03 Aug 2000 08:04:54 -0800

Uh-oh. In that case I take back the part where I said I had the hots for monobrow. That did post, right?

By: cCranium

cCranium — Thu, 03 Aug 2000 08:34:33 -0800

Wow. Wired's watching MeFi. I feel so... In the loop.

By: baylink

baylink — Thu, 03 Aug 2000 11:42:48 -0800

Damn you, Kottke. Hey, Wired? That's 'baylink.pitas.com'. Please spell it right. :-)

By: magnetbox

magnetbox — Fri, 04 Aug 2000 09:23:45 -0800

Yay! I got called a sucker!

By: metascene

metascene — Fri, 04 Aug 2000 16:34:23 -0800

I agree that these type of promotional sites are so much better and cooler than banner ads (as if that needed saying). I don't feel hoodwinked or anything. But I'm also not going to go out and buy Lee jeans. I only wish they had done a bit more with the pages...perhaps made the site bit deeper (add'l pages, links) like the space ghost site. Also, I am reminded that Levi's has done some interesting web projects in the past, which although perhaps a bit more literal, were more likely to encourage repeat visits by featuring web toys, exclusives, updates, etc. In addition, the approach to web promotion used by companies like Altoids is to my mind the sort of marketing strategy that should be encouraged. All in all, I'm glad that big ad agencies and corporations are trying new, creative approaches to promoting products, etc. But then again, I think that in order for this more sophisticated (?) type of advertising to really come into its own, companies will have to be a bit patient re: immediate sales results. Lots of really great advertising campaigns have been nixed because although they were memorable and even became cultural touchstones, they did not move units off the shelf.

By: Zeldman

Zeldman — Sat, 05 Aug 2000 09:32:47 -0800

seen this? from the horse's mouth. courtesy of dabitch, who runs ad-rag.com.

By: jazzyjeff

jazzyjeff — Mon, 05 Feb 2001 16:41:49 -0800

An ad? Does anyone think that this tool is also just a weird ad site? http://www.randywanker.com/ He seems too crass to be anything commercial, but so was that Curry guy. Jeff