Waiting for the #72 bus after work today, an ad at the bus stop caught my eye. It was an advertisement for Tru:Blood, a “synthetic blood nourishment beverage”. I was taken aback that there might actually be an alcoholic beverage that catered to freaks like me who have an obsession with interest in vampires. With a tagline like “friends don’t let friends drink friends”, I had to get a closer look. Upon further inspection, I saw that the ad was actually part of a marketing campaign for the new HBO show, True Blood.

Alan Ball, “Six Feet Under” creator, returns to HBO with True Blood, a series based on the Southern Vampire Mysteries books by Charlaine Harris. The show details the fictional co-existence of vampires and humans in a small Louisiana town after Japanese-made synthetic blood – “TruBlood” – becomes available for purchase. Anna Paquin stars as Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress at a diner who falls in love with one of the vampires, Bill Compton, who is played by Stephen Moyer-yeah, I don’t know who that is either. But hey-check out this giant piece of man. He plays Liam. Not that I know who that is, but apparently he’s a tattooed, sex-addicted vampire, so consider me interested.

The show’s premiere on September 7th has been prefaced with a viral marketing campaign, based at BloodCopy.com. This has included setting up multiple websites, encoding web addresses into unmarked envelopes mailed to high profile blog writers (I’ll assume my unmarked envelope got lost in the mail), a wikipedia entry collating info, and even a MySpace account (username: “Blood”) complete with video postings.

Author Harris admits that her vampire is a metaphor for minorities, and how they are perceived in society. In the show, vampires have decided to ‘come out of the coffin’ (their terminology, not mine), upon the advent of TruBlood. This is where the show seems be different from other vampire shows and movies-the focus is not on becoming a vampire, but the integration of vampires into everyday society, and the distrust and racism (mortalism?) that inevitably follows.

So…I’m pretty sure the marketing campaign is going to end up being more interesting than the actual show. Although I did learn a new word researching the show: Fangbangers–women who sleep with vampires. Loves it!

Eh, I’ll still watch it, I’m sure. But if it’s super lame, I’m gonna be pissed that it got picked up, and a second season of Moonlight didn’t.

[intr0vert’s Additional images: L.A. - click to enlarge]

Tags: Alan Ball, Anna Paquin, Charlaine Harris, HBO, Southern Vampire Mysteries, Stephen Moyer, tru:blood, True Blood, Vampires

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Chicago, Entertainment, Hollywood, Television, Vampires, Viral. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.