Spreading the Gospel of Robot Love
Well it’s not every day that you run into a full bore robot marketing contingent in the middle of downtown San Francisco, but that’s exactly what happened to me today. While out for lunch I ran smack dab into three robot lab babes, a giant robot and some marketing type guy that was directing them on what to do and negotiating with the pedal taxi guy about how much it would cost to drive them around downtown.
I suppose if we’re all skipping advertising on our TiVo’s, dumping radio and its advertising for podcasts and mp3s and never, ever, ever clicking on Google AdSense ads or opening spam email (right?) then it takes something really remarkable to get our attention. I wrote a while back about Starbuck’s coffee on the roof trick gimmick, but, this, a robot and robot babes in downtown San Francisco? Very geeky, very cool.
So the gimmick. Well, they want you to text message the word robot to 72237. I did it and got the following message back: “Welcome 2 Ratchet & Clank’s mobile club. Reply YES 2 join & enter 2 win a PS2 or the new Ratchet Deadlocked game. Reply Stop to end. Std msg rates apply.
Alright, so I’ll bite.
And I got back this: “Congrats on joining the Team! Get the latest updates @ www.dreadzonetv.com. You’ve been entered to win a PS2. Visit www.robotfriends.com for official rules. There doesn’t seem to be anything up at robotfriends.com yet.
Oops, I hope I just didn’t sign up for something I’ll need to cancel later or give text message address out to some spammer. Oh well. They got my attention I guess but then again it’s not every day that blue haired babes will sit still for me in downtown San Francisco and let me shoot away to my heart’s content. Here’s the complete Flickr set of the photos by the way.