So here I was this morning, reading the news checking my usual favorite blogs, when I came across another story about the Pomegranate NS08. You remember the device right? Looked kind of cool, it opened up into 3 distinct sections and offered some interesting ‘lifestyle’ features.
Having been suspicious of it just a tad, I wandered on over to the official Pomegranate site where I knew something was up. Upon exploring the site, I noticed the device offered a built in coffee brewer, a shaver, and a harmonica. ‘OK, what’s going on here?’ I thought… ‘This has to be a joke or some sort of wacky PR campaign!’
Looks like the latter was a correct assumption.
After some quick research it looks like the Pomegranate concept phone is part of a $300,000 ad campaign put together by the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. That’s right… Nova Scotia, that beautiful little province on the Atlantic coast of Canada. The campaign is part of the new Nova Scotian ‘Come to Life’ ad campaign, which hopes to build interest in the province through non-traditional means (you’re kidding!?).
‘Come to Life’ rep Stacey Jones-Oxner said in an email:
“We needed to find a unique way to get people focused on our province…Since there is so much buzz out there around the newest and latest smartphones, we thought this was a good device to use. This is especially true when you consider that the people who are interested in the latest technology are often people involved in business and tend to be key influencers.”
The website built for the make-believe device is now roughly a month old, and was built entirely by folks from Nova Scotia. The hosting is even setup in the province. To date, the site has received somewhere in the realm of 150,000/200,000 hits (no details on if the numbers are ‘hits’ or actual ‘unique visitors), which seems to be a surprisingly and stunningly low number for me. If I had spent $300,000 of my own coin on an ad campaign, you could bet I would want more eyeballs than that… And more importantly, I’d want 100% of them to know what is actually going on… I bet you half of the people that left the site still thought the device was for real!
At any rate, I simply thought this was uber-interesting, especially for a Saturday morning. You can go ahead and check out the official Pomegranate site here. Explore it long enough and you’ll eventually hit some promo materials for the province of Nova Scotia. Oh, and make sure to sound-off in the comments, would ya?
[Via: LA Times]