I think Google's job recruitment campaign with its math puzzle on a billboard is great.
The first thing I thought when I saw the ad was to recall the incredible grassroots marketing campaign for the less-than-incredible movie A.I. That one had secret web sites, messages buried inside HTML code, remote fax machines that would respond with instructions on how to find another message, and so forth.
What was great about that campaign was that I had no idea what it was all about (okay, maybe that's not so great for an ad campaign). All I knew was I spotted what seemed to be a hidden message on a web site, which lead me to a series of bizarre sites discussing “smart homes” that may have killed somebody, which sites contained hidden messages inside their own HTML code that lead to a large and detailed site for a university that didn't seem to exist, and so forth.
It was a great game, an intriguing mystery, and I just knew that any movie with this sort of ad campaign would have to be incredible.
I was wrong. But the ad campaign still rocked me like a hurricane. Nowadays, of course, hurricanes are trendy so we get a new one every week. But I was rocked like one of those old fashioned hurricanes, like Hazel or something.
