Scarlet: Unimaginitive Marketing At Its Worst

News outlets have been abuzz about Scarlet, the non-existent TV show. Commercials for the show were actually meant to hype a line of TVs with a scarlet back panel.

All the articles that speculate at all on the meaning of this focus on one thing: did it work? Are the duped consumers angry? Will it matter if they’re angry? Will they buy the TV anyway?

But what’s much more interesting is how poorly conceived the campaign is. The CEO of LG Electronics was quoted in the NY Times (print edition only, apparently), saying that TVs are a commodity, i.e. they’re basically all the same, and LG was just trying to draw attention to their non-unique TV somehow.

In other words, when they realized that they had nothing special to offer consumers, they decided to draw consumer attention to an imaginary product that would be interesting to consumers, and to then deflect that attention to themselves.

I find this effort disappointing on several levels:

1) LG completely threw out the idea of actually doing something interesting with their TVs to make them more than just a commodity. Was there really nothing? Not a cool remote control, or a fancy stand, or a special warranty…nothing at all? I bet there could have been, but not soon enough in the process. By the time the agency had convinced the CEO that they needed to stand apart from the crowd, they were already just another face in it.

2) Even if you’re selling a commodity, there are alternatives to this kind of thing that aren’t such a gamble. LG could have created (or just sponsored) some sort of TV-related resource, such as a website about TV shows, or a contest for users to send in TV-related materials (videos/testimonials/photos/whatever) in a social networking context. That way, you build an association between your brand and the idea of a TV in the mind of the consumer.

3) Paradoxically (but appropriately), the fake show promoted in the ads is not interesting. Sure, there’s a pretty girl kicking ass, and a sort of vague sci-fi feeling, and that’s nice to look at. But it’s no more compelling here than it was on Buffy or Alias or Dark Angel or all the others. In other words, sci-fi action movies starring hot girls are also a commodity. The Scarlet commercial still ended up being just another generic commercial for just another generic show. The fact that the show doesn’t actually exist is just a detail.