The claim: California's state bird, the quail, is brown and ugly and should be replaced by a parrot.
No, that's not another bizarre California ballot measure. It's part of an advertising campaign by Parrot, one of the many companies trying to get consumers to buy their hands-free devices in advance of Tuesday's ban on driving while talking on a cellphone without using a headset.
Rather than showcase their devices in TV and print ads, many companies have decided instead to go the nontraditional route. They have created viral videos, dreamed up a scheme in which a ticket for driving with a cellphone could be used as a coupon for a hands-free device and created a whole campaign to replace the state bird with a parrot, complete with a petition and a letter to the governor.
Nontraditional advertising "can bring effectiveness and reach that traditional advertising cannot," said Scott Leonard, president of A.D.D. Marketing, a Los Angeles-based ad agency. "It can get people to stop in their tracks and focus on something in a real deep and meaningful way."
It's also cheap, Leonard said. That could be important because many companies won't allocate much money to advertise in only California and Washington, the two states that have bans on driving while talking on a cellphone going into effect Tuesday.
Aside from the site at www.parrotnotquail.com, which extols the virtues of both parrot the bird and Parrot the Paris-based company, there also are billboards and a radio campaign in which a host named Positive Parrot talks about road rage. The company has also created two viral videos in which a bratty teen drives his instructors mad by talking on his cellphone during a driving lesson.
If you've found some fake bird poop on your car recently, along with a reminder about the cellphone ban, that's Parrot too.
"We didn't really have the money to run TV ads, so we tried to find interesting ways to get people to engage with the brand," said Laura Eastman, director of client services at Ground Zero, the Los Angeles ad agency behind the state bird campaign.
The videos have increased traffic on Parrot.com 25%, said Bryan Westbrook, a spokesman for Feed Co., which created the videos.
Another video, created by Cardo Systems Inc., a maker of hands-free devices, has been viewed more than 4 million times since it was posted last month, and versions in French and Japanese have received a lot of hits. In the videos, a few friends put kernels of popcorn on a table with cellphones. They call the cellphones, which makes the popcorn pop.
