I’m seeing more offline to online campaigns that seem to be built around gag sites.

There are currently Mott’s ads running on TV in Canada that show inept Bloody Caesar drinkers getting poked in the eye by celery stalks. The last few seconds of the ad include a discrete URL in the bottom corner sending you to www.celeristis.com.

The site (a fictional research group looking into this affliction) points to Abrams & Ross who seem to be working on a class action suit for sufferers, and both gag sites point to an article on the topic at the CELERY (a not-so-subtle parody of the ONION).

I’m not so sure that this strategy will work. My guess is that putting legitimate URLs on screen will get more useful traffic than this and there really isn’t much to make the campaign “go viral”.

The site really seems to be about getting names for a list. I signed up and here’s what I got about 10 minutes later: