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GPS Panties: The Best Product Launch of 2005 That Doesn't Exist...Yet
Here are panties with built-in GPS winning raves in Cosmo and "selling out" online. They just didn't exist.
To stay on top of media trends, we often have to read widely and weirdly in order to get a handle of what it beginning to happen. As media morphs in this electronic age, the opportunity to get new ideas out into the marketplace have never been greater. As we've been discussing this week on the Jointblog, products connect with potential customers when the idea maximizes media design. Key cues, "The Look" and search strength all make a difference. So does the idea itself.
Last year, a contest was started by a NYC art/science non-profit think tank called Eyebeam offering a $2,000 prize for the website that gained the most traffic in a three-week window without using paid advertising. It was an experiment for understanding how viral marketing works on the Internet now. It was a terrific example of showing the importance of media design, blending cue, look and search withing fresh ideas and thinking.
So here is what happened with the winner:
Back in the spring of '05, a curious new product began popping up in blogs and then in mainstream publications such as Rolling Stone, the Guardian, the Observer and Australian Cosmo. Forget Me Not Panties, a line of women's underwear with a built-in global positioning system (GPS), was advertised by its creators as a way to keep track of girlfriends, wives or daughters. It was an instant hit. The website noted it was sold out. Close to 2,000 people put their names on the waiting list. Companies such as Target, the giant U.S. department store, clamoured to distribute it.
It would have been one of the most successful product launches of 2005 -- if there had been a product. But Leba Haber Rubinoff and Katie Marsh had created the website as a hoax. It was an entry in the Contagious Media Showdown...and it won the competition hands-down (or is that panties down?)
For Haber Rubinoff and Marsh, the concept was a humorous way to get people talking about gender. "Initially, our intent was to make people kind of angry, get a passionate response," says Haber Rubinoff. "We thought we were going to get a lot of women and feminists who were upset, but in fact a lot of the women who emailed us wanted to have a male version of the panties." The duo, who call themselves the Panty Raiders, won the competition -- and garnered mass amounts of press. "People wrote about us without doing a lot of research," says Haber Rubinoff, noting that most articles have talked about the panties as if they were real. "If you just Google us you'd find out that we're part of a competition."
The competition is a perfect example of how ideas spread virally across the Internet. When people hear about it they need to tell other people about it. They forward to friends, it gets linked on a blog, a reporter reads the blog and writes something, and then all of a sudden it snowballs.
GPS panties...a wacky idea. But so is the Burger King catching touchdown passes on TV...you notice it, you talk about it and you increase brand awareness. Let's just hope the BK King doesn't start wearing panties.
--Chris Kennedy
full GPS panties story
Contagious Media Project website
Forget-Me-Not Panties
posted by Unknown @ Friday, January 20, 2006,
1 Comments:
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At 7:23 AM,
India Forex said...
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What a great blog, thanks!
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Regards,
Jessica
www.indiaforex.com
