Wednesday July 02, 2008 at 12:24
Viral Marketing gets really creepy in London
Added later — a couple of other posts in this blog about the same subject:
* “Them Faceless Folk: Punking the mainstream media”;
* “Viral Marketing Fooling the English (and others): Not as New as You Think.”
DListed asks if the literally faceless folks pictured in the entry linked in this post’s subject line are Anonymous, up to shenanigans again.
No. Anonymous is clever (I’m a fan, not a non-part of the non-group), but they don’t usually go for the creep-out factor — unless you’re a Scientologist yourself, that is.
It’s patently obvious what’s up with the faceless ones — 10 seconds on what my Granny might call “The Google” gives you this:
And the logo at the bottom of that web page for Lotus cars is a match to the logo worn on the lapels of the “faceless” models in London. It’s viral marketing for a car, y’all. The FacelessPeople.com domain is owned by Lotus.
London is supposedly the ne plus ultra of surveillance society — cameras everywhere, capturing everyone doing everything. Those faceless getups would be an awesome protest of that sort of thing. But it makes more sense that some ad man came up with them to get buzz going for a new line of vehicles or something like that.
I agree with the commenter at DListed who said this: “Please be something cooler!”
Update
Just so it’s clear, here’s the domain info for FacelessPeople.com:
Registrant:
Group Lotus Plc
Potash Lane
Hethel
Norwich, Norfolk NR14 8EZ
United Kingdom
Domain Name: FACELESSPEOPLE.COM
Created on: 13-Jun-08
Expires on: 13-Jun-09
Last Updated on: 23-Jun-08
And you can see Lotus’s own website here.
So, to sum up:
— London’s mysterious faceless people are part of a viral promotion for Lotus Cars.
— The slogan on FacelessPeople.com makes this abundantly clear: “True character will emerge in…” The logic seems clear: Our faces give us character. Faceless people = people without character. Until they buy a fucking Lotus or something, I guess.
I do actually think the surveillance society so rampant in London may have influenced this campaign, but this is just a guess.
As for Anonymous — I just can’t help but think they’d come up with something much, much cooler.
Additional link: io9.com caught onto this at just about the exact same time I did.
