The CW Takes to the Skies to Promote New Series

With all of the talk about integration of TV and digital, I was struck by this bit of old-school promotional weirdness over the weekend on the beaches along the South Shore of Boston: a single-prop airplane hauling a banner promoting the CW's new version of "Melrose Place" and "The Vampire Diaries."

Why this was a good place to promote these series puzzles me -- it's not as though the South Shore, which includes the small beach communities of Humarock and Green Harbor is a hotbed of population, or the youth market these series want to attract, even on Labor Day. (Green Harbor's population is a modest 2,400 according to the 2000 census.) But there the plane went, on both Saturday and Sunday, towing its banner. It was the only advertising plane of any sort in service over the weekend in that area -- not to mention the only airplane advertising two new TV series.

For fun, I checked out an aerial advertising company that flies its planes in the Boston area and elsewhere in the U.S. It said that prospective advertisers could reach 100 million potential customers in thirty days! If these two series end up being hits, now you'll know why. It's because the CW was flying planes all weekend.