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Coupland goes viral, Staples tags along

The final three YouTube video trailers for Douglas Coupland’s new novel, The Gum Thief, were released last week. The series has been attracting steady traffic since the campaign started a month ago.

CBC.ca reports:

[Coupland’s publisher] Random House worked with marketer Crush Toronto to produce the nine viral shorts, which they hope will attract people to Coupland who don’t usually read fiction.

The most popular videos, which have collectively logged over 3,000 views, are the ones based on Glove Pond, the novel-within-the-novel at the heart of The Gum Thief; they feature Coupland deadpanning over an animated collage of late 1970s-style advertisements for cigarettes and scotch (excerpts from the novel are cleverly worked in as ad copy). The result is surprisingly stylish, casual, and hip, and oh so Couplandian.

The irony, of course, is that Coupland’s viral campaign is itself embedded with ads – whether intentionally or not – for Staples, the office supply superstore in which the novel is set. Three of the videos are filmed in the aisles of an anonymous Staples outlet, while two others feature stop-motion animation using thousands of small “s” staples – what a marketer might call subliminal metonymy.

Whether the real-life Staples is privy to – or paying for – any of this is yet unclear, but Coupland could take a cue from author Jim Munroe, who in 2002 invoiced real-life brands lampooned in his novel Everyone in Silico for (admittedly unwanted) product placements.

By

October 30th, 2007

2:10 pm

Category: Book news

Tagged with: Douglas Coupland, marketing