Rhymes With Orange

My coworker Eric sent me an email yesterday. The email simply contained a url to http://www.orangelabel.com/icons.htm

There was something odd about this email. First of all, Eric is a programmer. He’s never sent me anything design related. Secondly, his email was titled “poor peer review?” So I went to the site and it appeared to be a regular web design related site, focusing on icon design and development. I looked around the site looking for some sort of anomaly. After couple minutes I gave up. I was never good at Where’s Waldo.

So, with another coworker’s help, I finally got it. Hint: look at the windows task bar in the header image. My first reaction was “Oh man they messed up big time, did they even QA this thing?” Just as I was about to forward this link to everyone I know, and hoping they’d forward to everyone they know, it suddenly hit me. What if they did this on purpose? What if this is some sort of ingenious marketing. Looking at the task tabs, I also saw DailyWTF there, a blog I read regularly. Not to my surprise, I found a DWTF blog on this “blunder.” Now I’m even more suspicious. After combing through 100+ comments, I learned that the orange site had updated the image later, to include the DWTF tab. It’s obvious they’re aware of of what they’re doing, and they also read popular blogs.

I admit it’s a clever way of bringing traffic to their site. I’ve told several friends about it already. Hell, I’m writing a blog about it now! But I wonder how effective it is to actually sell a product. The Viral/Shock type of advertising tends to draw instant attention. But to be honest, most of these ads do just that, draw attention to the shock value. Does anyone remember what product this commercial actually tried to sell? (without using your googleforce or youtubefu)