- T.L. Stanley

It was a tart and tangy orange soda, not a synthetic blood substitute that sated vampires and kept them from feasting on humans. But the first glimpse of Tru Blood, at its unveiling at the recent Comic-Con in San Diego, sent 4,500 fans into such a shrieking frenzy you’d have thought the carbonated drink was going to save their lives.

Granted, the room was packed with the rabid faithful who’d waited hours to see the cast of HBO’s hit drama, True Blood, and best-selling author Charlaine Harris, on whose book series the show is based. But all that series creator and writer Alan Ball had to do was hold up the sleek, crimson-colored bottle, without saying a word, to get a response so raucous it nearly shook the building.

Welcome to the True Blood universe, where fantasy and reality are as intertwined as a smoldering bad-boy vamp and the fang girl who loves him. Tru Blood, the drink of choice for domesticated vampires on the show, gave rise to the Tru Blood you can now use as a cocktail mixer while watching Sookie Stackhouse and the twisted happenings in Bon Temps.

The steamy Louisiana-set series with its central premise that vampires mingle in polite society has proven to be fertile ground for Courteney Monroe, HBO’s evp of consumer marketing, who admits she’d never been much of a vampire fan. (She has the fervor of the newly converted now).

What appealed to her as a marketer was the chance to blur the lines and create a groundbreaking fact-or-fiction campaign for season two that could turn heads and court controversy while broadening the modest audience of early adopters and genre fans who latched onto season one.

It was a project that Monroe could really sink her teeth into.

“It’s a marketing department’s dream,” says Monroe, an 11-year HBO veteran who spearheads the marketing around the show, including a growing merchandising line. It’s also turned out to be a star on HBO—drawing 11 million viewers per episode and increasing its ratings 38 percent this season compared to its first.

Monroe and her team did more than take the vampires-walk-among-us theme and run with it. They practically bathed in it, creating a campaign that Ball describes as “very stylish and very elegant. It maintains the pulp nature of the show,” he says, “and it’s very smart and very modern.”

Among the tactics: producing a news magazine-style show to report on the uneasy co-existence of vampires and humans; adding fangs to A-list celebrities in Vanity Fair party photos; enlisting radio DJs to make nighttime wake-up calls to vampires; and taking over city newspaper amNew York and dubbing it VAMP NY, then filling it with news vampires could use.

They partnered with a half-dozen real brands to produce vampire-targeted faux ads via agency Digital Kitchen. Harley-Davidson used “Outrun the sun” as a tagline for a True Blood-branded Iron 883 motorcycle; Gillette’s campaign said vampires prefer the Fusion shave because it’s “Dead sexy”; and Ecko urged vampires to splash on its fragrance to “Attract a human.” It’s all the more noteworthy because HBO isn’t ad supported, so this was a rare combination, and marketers don’t usually allow anyone to toy  with their logos and trademarks.

“If it had been done with made-up brands, that would’ve been so 2005,” says Bob Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University and self-professed True Blood addict. “This is hip and in tune with the sensibility of the show and the audience.”

The network has taken full advantage of the “explosion of interest” in vampires, Thompson says, yet has distinguished True Blood from successful properties like Twilight through its sumptuous, shrewd and very adult marketing.

That included vampire-targeted ads appearing at the multiplex, where a big-screen slide promoted fang cleaning and sharpening from a member of the True Blood Dental Association. And since the undead are everywhere, Monroe’s team had them popping up in viral videos and writing chatty blogs. (And so did their right-wing religious adversaries, the heavily armed Fellowship of the Sun, via agency Campfire). “It’s all designed to make you do a double take,” explains Monroe.”You’re supposed to stop, make the association and then giggle.”

Too bad some people didn’t get the joke. A hubbub broke out after an official-seeming announcement that well-trafficked Gawker Media had acquired BloodCopy, a blog by and about vampires. Some news outlets took it seriously, when in fact it was part of the show’s guerrilla marketing efforts.

“The goal has never been to mislead people,” Monroe says. “It’s all done with a wink.” Even so, Gawker editors took the rare step of apologizing to readers, saying the stunt went too far, which, from Monroe’s perspective was simply another marketing coup. “It contributed to the noise” around the show.

Or, one might say, gave it a bite.