In the last week or so, satirical ads with some amazingly terrible stock photography for a pharmaceutical product called Obay have been popping up all over Toronto. The ads have generated considerable buzz in the blogging community (Torontoist, Buzz Canuck and NOTCOT to name a few). While I have my doubts about the overall communication strategy (I’ll reserve judgement until the big reveal), there was definitely a major opportunity missed in not taking this viral campaign online from launch. As a commenter writes on a Flickr photo of one of the ads, “I’d be interested to know more about who’s doing it, surprised there’s no website address included.”

Colleges Ontario could have very easily created an Obay site (mimicing typical pharma content and styles) to allow people to further indulge the curiosity the ads so effectively created. Instead the audience is left waiting until the next round of communication reaches them, which will probably be long enough that most of the audience will lose interest. There is no reason that in this age that someone eager to engage should be left empty handed. Even television shows like Lost that rely on cliff hangers between episodes have begun providing content to let users dig deeper if they choose too (Lost has done it particularly well, but I’ll save that for another post).

The Obay ads should have pointed to a site that either could have had Colleges Ontario’s message buried deep within it or it could have evolved over time to reveal the true messaging. At the very least, they could have setup a submit form saying something along the lines of “Obay is currently in clinical trials, please enter your email address below if you would like to be among the first to try Obay upon its release,” (I am sure they would have collected a pretty good number of emails).

The real kicker here is that because Obay is a made up word, Colleges Ontario would not even have had to include a URL. People would have likely found the site if they punched it into Google (which I am sure a lot of people did), but now because they have created all this buzz without first getting a website in place, the Obay site (if there is one planned) will have to compete with its own buzz in the search engine rankings.

Update: I just noticed that Colleges Ontario is running PPC ads on Obay searches, which is a step in the right direction, but it hardly whets my appetite for finding out what Obay is all about (no mention of it on the landing page).