A deathly embrace: Mark Ecko's True Blood tie-in.

While marketers have spent considerable resources trying to target tweens, millenials, baby boomers and other such cleverly-named demographics, there is one segment that has slipped through the cracks: vampires.

Not wanting to alienate this eternally-young, and therefore ideal, target market, Digital Kitchen, Chicago and HBO and Alan Ball's vampire series True Blood teamed with a roster of brands - Mark Ecko, Geico, Gillette, Harley-Davidson, Mini and Monster.com - to cater to the cold-blooded consumer.

The integrated campaign promotes True Blood's sophomore season with a spin on its premise - if vampires live among us, as the show espouses, then why shouldn't they also be marketed to? The print and OOH component, which rolled out at the end of May, takes each brand's instantly recognizable creative and reworks it to tie-in with the show. So, for example, Geico's tagline, "The Money You Could Have Saved with Geico" becomes "The Money You Could Have Saved if You Were Immortal".

That Digital Kitchen were able to alter each brand's messaging is something of a coup, considering the creative and financial resources agencies put into crafting brand's identities. To then let an outside agency rework what another carefully thought out is generally considered sacrilege.

"You're taking the client's brand, which is inviolate stuff in marketing, and you're asking them to trust you with it," says Todd Brandes, DK's director of business and production strategy. "You're asking them to trust a digital agency that is not even their agency of record."

To avoid creating off-brand messaging, DK worked with each brand's respective agencies to make sure that the True Blood tie in was on point with their existing strategies.

The brands, in fact, were eager to participate because of the show's critical acclaim. DK reached out to as many brands as possible, expecting to get go-aheads from two or three. They ended up with six. The primary reason a few brands gave for declining was that True Blood's dark and violent subject matter didn't fit in with their image.

Like the show, the campaign mixes macabre material with sly humor, and whereas DK had to pull back somewhat on the edgier content in the print component, the digital side of the campaign allowed the agency to fully explore True Blood's dark and disturbing side.

"That was the big feedback from [show creator] Alan Ball," says Brandes of the five online videos that continue the theme of vampires living among us, albeit with content such as a guide dog that morphs into a naked human to the horror of its owner ("Seeing Eye Dog") to a disturbing emergency call that suggests a night of vampire sex gone wrong ("9-1-1").

"Alan looks at this show as popcorn entertainment even though it's a little dark. So the co-branded stuff has a ‘wink and a smile' to it," explains Brandes. "But on the virals we tried to really go to both ends of the spectrum. There's stuff that's really dark and stuff that's really humorous. We needed to maintain that balance. So doing the two different types of virals helped us so that we didn't have to pick or choose dark or light. We were able to do a little bit of both."

While Brandes believes the campaign delivers on HBO's open and extremely succinct brief - "Generate buzz" - his initial fear that the idea wouldn't get off the ground was happily proved wrong.

"I can be a pessimist sometimes," he admits. "I worked for the agency side my whole career, and on the client side. My last job was as Motorola's director of global advertising so I could see it from both sides. I knew from the agency side how difficult it would be [to execute this type of idea] and I knew from the client side how hard it would be to sell it through.

"I was very happily surprised when we started getting the feedback we did," he continues. "I haven't seen anything quite like this campaign and that's what we set out to do. Our internal mantra is ‘disrupt the system'. And this campaign turned out to be a natural embodiment of disrupting the system in everyway."

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