It's a bird, it's a plane ... it's an ad agency?
A mysterious entity called Clark&Kent recently announced itself as a new ad agency headquartered in a phone booth in New York City. It has a picture of said phone booth on its website. It has cool business cards that fold into a phone booth.
But most important for the people behind it, the agency has generated lots of cheap publicity thanks to the Superman motif.
Clark&Kent has been stingy with details, but The Huffington Post managed to squeeze more information out of 'em. It didn't take any Lex Luthor threats -- just the promise of free press in a prominent online newspaper.
Clark&Kent is really three guys, Mr. Clark, Mr. And and Mr. Kent. They have a secretary with a San Francisco area code, for some reason. They have all been employed in advertising and recently appeared as their alter egos at the Cannes Lions advertising convention. They're not sure when they might reveal their true identities -- and why should they? Their marketing gimmick seems to be working.
"We were 'born' as an imaginary agency, but all the buzz generated around our startup made it real," Mr. Kent emailed to HuffPost. "In less then 24 hours we switched from an imaginary agency to a real brand. Which, considering we are living in a brand-led and slogan saturated world, is a good thing. It means that there was an empty space in the corner of people’s minds where our phone booth perfectly fitted."
Asked if it's a hoax or social experiment, Kent replied, "It's a project. We first wanted to demonstrate the superpowers of a single idea. Big ideas don't need big space. And this is not a bad thing, especially if you have to pay rent."
As for their mission, Kent resorted to ad-speak about the power of stories, but left little doubt that a certain metropolis plays a prominent part.
"We believe that New York is a city with special powers," Kent said. "Anything that happens here can suddenly become famous all over the world. And it’s exactly what happened to our phone booth."