Redbird Flu
Last fall, the St. Louis Cardinals severed the club’s broadcasting deal with KMOX radio, the station which had broadcast Cards games for more than fifty years with legends like Harry Caray and Jack Buck at the microphone. The fact that Cardinal Nation was built with KMOX’s 50,000 watt signal didn’t count for much to the Cards, who dropped KMOX like a scorecard chronicling a game lost late in the ninth inning, electing instead to partner with a minor-league broadcaster, KTRS radio, in exchange for fifty percent ownership in the station and increased revenue generated by out-of-market fans forced to turn to pay-to-listen alternatives to KMOX’s ubiquitous signal. Many life-long Cards fans reacted to the deal the way that A Christmas Story’s Ralphie did after he had secreted off to the bathroom with his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring to learn that his radio hero had sold out to Ovaltine.
That sportswriting correspondence course has really paid off for me, don’t you think? Never mind.
In an apparent attempt to conclusively establish its bush league status, KTRS radio has now resorted to pathetic marketing chicanery:
At its core, last month’s theft of two St. Louis Cardinals redbirds from billboards was a publicity stunt to hype a local radio station. But it actually represents much more - a relatively new type of advertising and marketing where the ethical boundaries are still being drawn.
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Called viral marketing, it’s grassroots marketing with a high-tech twist. The idea is to create noise on the wide-open spaces of Internet blogs about a product or client, and generate chit-chat around the office water cooler as well.
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St. Louis-based Schupp Co., an advertising agency, kept Cardinals blogs abuzz last month when it created fake user profiles on www.myspace.com/birdnapper and www.cardsclubhouse.com.
Schupp and St. Louis-based public relations firm Fleishman Hillard posted comments to generate conversation about the disappearance of 12 giant redbirds on six billboards across the area. The idea was to promote KTRS, the new home of Cardinals radio broadcasts. Besides the false identities, blog readers didn’t know Schupp actually planned the “birdnapping.”
Advertising gurus claim there is no such thing as bad publicity. Let’s prove them wrong.
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