Born Again Stealth Marketing

So I’m on my way into Black Rock yesterday for the CBS confab when a young woman presses a Quaker Oats granola bar attached to a card into my hand. No biggie. Sixth Ave. can be rife with rush hour product samples, and few would decline the quasi-healthy treat at 8:30 a.m. So later at the office, the thing’s sitting on my desk. An URL catches my eye, along with plugs for the hot summer movies: Fantastic Four, Willy Wonka, War of the Worlds. Idly wondering if we need to cover some sort of Quaker Oats/major studio coop advertising something, I hit the granola card URL and land on The Journey, a site geared to young, evangelical Christians. Their “God On Film” series promises to reveal the spiritual lessons in the summer’s blockbusters (Tim Burton?); offers gifts with site registration; a mass baptism at Jones Beach…there are even apartment listings.

Pamela’s written about Christian buzz networks, but this site floored me along with the rest of the ClickZ ed team. Jaded NY’ers that we are, we’d mentally filed that category in the flyover zone file. Who’s jaded now? It’s happening here – studio tie-ins, granola bars, guerilla marketing, and a deep, sophisticated site. Wow.

(No online coversions on this end yet.)