Sci Fi Channel Targets Flea Markets With ‘Warehouse 13' Tags
New Series Takes Retro Promotional Tack
by Kent Gibbons -- Multichannel News, 6/12/2009 12:02:01 PM EDT
If you're at a flea market in New York City or near L.A., you might see an item hung with a brown tag that asks "Does this object have hidden powers?"
To find out the answer, you have to go to a new Web site promoting the new Sci Fi Channel series Warehouse 13.
The tags will show up first in Pasadena, Calif., at the Rose Bowl Flea Market on Sunday (June 14), where they'll also be stuffed into bags as postcards. They'll be in Brooklyn, N.Y., at the Fort Greene Flea Market June 27 and the Brooklyn Flea Market on July 5.
Sci Fi picked the unusual marketing venues because the show centers on a huge, secret storage facility in South Dakota, nicknamed America's attic, network VP of brand marketing Blake Callaway said. The caretaker, Artie (Saul Rubinek), sends agents Pete (Eddie McClintock) and Myka (Joanne Kelly) out chasing down reports of supernatural and paranormal activity in search of new objects to store.
The interactive Web site -- Scifi.com/Warehouse13 -- is styled like the show. A video of Artie (Rubinek), displayed on a geeky retro communication device called a Farnsworth, greets visitors. When they type in an object name, Artie searches his files to determine if said object should be consigned to the warehouse. If it turns out that it is "charmed" and holds some secret provenance, Artie prompts the visitor to consign the object right away.
Previously consigned objects can be scanned on an interactive map of the warehouse; a ticker shows the latest consigned objects.
On-line consumers, who visit Ebay and Oodle, can also participate and be on the look out for objects which have customized digital tags that might belong in the warehouse.
The show starts July 7, when the network changes to Syfy.
