Just a week ago, on October 1st, Milan was agitated by a huge submarine that surfaced in the city center. Fortunately, it was a pedestrian street, therefore Milan traffic was not disturbed. Submariners started giving interviews and trying to explain what happened to them. However, soon it became obvious that they were not real submariners and it was not even a real boat! It turned out, that this whole installation was organized for Europ Assistance IT, Milanese insurance firm. More precisely, they were advertising their “Protect Your Life” campaign.
It is not the first time when companies are trying to market their product in such an creative way. In 1993, a crop circle appeared in a field of rye in Johannesburg. The South African media were widely discussing whether it was a sign of UFO. It took them a while to notice that this circle looks exactly as BMW logo.
It is interesting, that something similar happened in my home country as well. A fake meteorite fell in Latvia in 2009. Police, firemen and scientists arrived to the site right away and investigated the case for two days. Before long, Tele 2, a Swedish telecommunications company that operates in European countries, admitted that it was their campaign aimed at promoting their new rate plan called “Meteorite”.
These marketing strategies appear to work really well. As a result of these hoaxes, a lot of attention is drawn to the companies that use this kind of advertisement. In the case of a fake submarine, this insurance company succeeded to arouse the interest not only of people they were targeting, but of a whole world. Still, they have to be very careful. Sometimes this commercial success might not be worth it, because it can entail serious consequences, for example, big fines from the government.
Photos are taken from:
http://www.designboom.com/art/a-massive-submarine-emerges-in-milans-city-center-10-02-2013/
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/permalink/the_bmw_crop_circle