When you see the trailer for a “hit new TV series” what do you expect? Entertainment of course! But that’s because we have allowed our brains to associate ‘TV’ and a trailer with something to watch, not, some hardware.

But that’s just what LG Electronics did — fooled ya! The trailer had a character named ‘Scarlet’ and had all the stereotypical fast cuts and slow motion, a kick-boxing vixen. The Scarlet Series micro site, reveals all. There is a ‘Directors Cut’ where he says it was really hard pulling off the deceit with a recipe that included celebs, Hollywood, PR gurus, and reporters. All in the service of launching a line of flat screen TV’s.

Some have called it a hoax and deceptive. Well, it’s nothing new, is it –word play and visual puns in advertising? The stuff of teasers, when marketers did have money to tease the audience, and audiences did have time for time for word play.

What’s more disappointed in the attempt to stretch a me-too concept into something that pretends to be viral. Odd coincidence here. The folks behind it are from Agency.com –the same agency that thought it was cool ‘going viral’ when pitching for a Subway account with a dumb YouTube experiment.

There’s also a post launch microsite. Someone probably made a killing on turning one microsite project into two.