On Wednesday morning, Alexander Close, a digital media manager at MacLaren McCann, was taking screen grabs of Russian and Japanese articles about a flyer saucer over Vancouver. “It’s quite funny,” said Close, because he didn’t understand what the foreign stories were saying about his agency’s little stunt.
Presumably, it was in line with what hundreds of other stories and videos around the globe were saying: A flyer saucer was spotted in locations around Vancouver, and on Sept. 9 it hovered above a Vancouver Canadians baseball game.
Three days later, it was revealed the UFO was a hoax designed to create buzz for the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre’s new Planetarium Theatre, which underwent a half-million-dollar upgrade this summer. (Perhaps understandably, many of the stories about the UFO have since been pulled off the web.)
The “extreme teaser campaign” culminated in the release of a PSA that showed the UFO flying in and replacing the old building with the new one, with the statement that the planetarium is “new and improved.”
The concept for the PSA came from the fact that the building resembles a flying saucer when viewed from the side, said Close. That led to “what if we made a UFO drone?” and, thus, the hoax was born.
A YouTube video of the UFO at Nat Bailey Stadium, posted by the agency, has captured more than 315,000 views alone. The total number of YouTube views on videos related to the campaign reached more than one million in less than 13 days, according to the agency.
“We wanted to make sure that we came totally clean and say ‘this is what we did,’ but also to just allow it to take off by itself,” said Close. “When people say, ‘hey, what’s that in the skies?’ it ties into the planetarium’s ‘Look Up’ [positioning]. There’s a lot of cool stuff out there and this hoax UFO drone is just one of them.”
