Chief among the many wonderful components of HBO’s Silicon Valley — heroically elaborate dick jokes, the simple presence of Martin Starr, a rotating cast of excellent guest stars — is its keen understanding of technology and the scene surrounding it. While most shows can’t even muster a believable computer display monitor, Silicon Valley has tossed off timely and savvy jokes about Uber, Google Glass, and the Apple Maps debacle. It’s clearly made by people who “get” the parody-ready start-up culture that’s taken over the Bay Area like a plague, and that same industry hipness has now extended to their advertising campaigns.
Type in “silicon valley” or “silicon valley HBO” to Google, scroll down a touch, and beneath the official show website and the page for a regular publication chronicling the goings-on in the tech-saturated coastal community, there’s a panel of news items. “Stanford Robotics Reports ‘Bam-Bot’ Damaged In Field Testing,” “Are Hooli shares on a tear? Bloomberg West’s Emily Change and Brad Stone have the scoop…” and “Introducing Jack ‘Action Jack’ Barker!” all appear in this mini-window, but something’s not quite right. Regular Silicon Valley viewers will recognize these as plot points from Sunday night’s third-season premiere episode, which found the Pied Piper founders once again shackled to an eccentric new interloper on their business. The ad team put their most creative guerrilla marketing campaign to date right where everyone could see it, on the most-used search engine on the internet.
The advertisers have committed pretty fully to the bit, even throwing up the fake tech-news site Code Rag as a home for their fake news stories, and recording a forty-second video clip from a fictitious tech-finances newscast. It’s always entertaining to see ad firms exercise a little creativity in the format and content of what ultimately boils down to an extended commercial, and Silicon Valley proves that their industry know-how goes beyond their scripts.
