Phoney Giraffe

Who wouldn’t like cute little pets. Especially if it is a 15 to 76 centimetres Giraffe. I came across a link to Petit Lap Giraffe (PLG) when a friend shared the link on his facebook wall. At first I thought it was something similar to Camillie Allen’s baby dolls. Upon surfing the website, it suggested that these PLGs are bred in Sokoblovsky Farms in Southern Russia (Krasnodar). And it shared photos and commercial video links where the giraffes were featured. Baffled, I surfed the site more and found a link to watch the live feed where the PLG is bred. The video feed had time stamp of my local time in it. So, I changed my time zone and refreshed the feed, this time the feed took my new time zone and showed a different clip. Both feeds never showed the time in Krasnodar. To make it look like real, at times we even lose connection to the live feed! When I checked the domain registration details it was just 40 days old and was registered to Grey Global Group, a marketing firm in New York. I confirmed that its a very intriguing marketing strategy for DirectTV. DirectTV commercials which featured these fictional PLGs a while ago has dedicated a whole website for the PLGs, which now acts as a PLG fan website as well as a marketing tool.

Life feed when my clock was set to Indian Standard Time

Life feed when my clock was set to US Central Time.

This marketing strategy comes in line with the movie 2012 which cleverly ended its trailer with the note “Goggle 2012”.