The Alpha-1 fake wrapping of the statue of Liberty

I agree it's weak sauce (the fake-alarms ring way too loud, I mean chill with the shaky camera already), but I'm not even sure a stunt with famous people having their faces wrapped would get attention for a genetic disease. What's the call to action here? Stop breeding? Selective genetics? People are fully informed that the genetic disorder color blindness exists, but there's not much we can do to prevent it (though there are neat contacts that can be used). We know about haemophilia too, and that's been helped by making royals stop marrying each other (I'm only half-kidding). This is the reason for the stunt:

Current data suggest that less than 10% of those people living with Alpha-1 have been properly diagnosed.

In other words, a bunch of people diagnosed with asthma or smoking-related Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease actually have alpha-1. If they're doing this stunt to inform these people that they might have alpha-1 instead, they might get better results by targeting them directly, no?

Wow! It's like I have good cop and bad cop at me here!

Don't worry JohnKonig unoriginal insults based on my name flick an immediate "ignore" switch in my brain, and I've received much worse, and way more creative, in the way of threats. So, back to the video, and the topic of this website (Adland) which is to look at it from an advertising p.o.v. Thin-skinned creatives, sufferers of illnesses and fans of various charitable organisations should take note that we're critiquing the ad, the marketing strategy, the idea, and the execution. Not the product, organisations, or for that matter sufferers of illnesses. Clear on that? Ice-cream? OK.

Lets start with the statue of liberty as the stunt-area. Not bad, she did after all say "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...." and practically every red-blooded American knows this by heart, so there you have a breathing connection right off the bat, Alpha-1 makes it hard to breathe. And doing something to the actual statue of liberty is right up there with tagging Air Force one, considering the security and symbolism. Then you prevent the French lady from breathing with... Saran Wrap or something. Okay, this is stretching it. Saran Wrap is see-through. I can imagine that other items were considered, such as swimming pool covers, but then Lady Liberty might look like she was wearing a Niqab since they're either dark blue or black, and that would send the wrong message.

Your photographs show what we see in the film, that a boat was in the water at night near Liberty Island - this is not the part of the clip we doubt has happened, so you've only proven the boat was in the water near Liberty Island which was never in doubt.

So back to Saran Wrap, and this film. In the boat, aiming to get to the actual island surrounded by control markers several hundred feet out where you'd attract the attention of the Park Police at 1000 ft out, and there's no private dock only one built for the ferry, we're supposed to believe (without any images showing the docking with telltale Liberty Island visual cues) that this boat docked on that island. We then see running camera toward the statue at night, and the inside of something that is presumed to be Lady Liberty herself, but we haven't seen the new copper doors or anything that tells us we're going in her. Then up the stairs to the head which was re-opened for tourists as recently as 2009, the copper doors that are locked after closing hours.

The Saran Wrap rolls we've been shown earlier in the clip, a few restaurant sized rolls at maybe a meter wide, have not been prepared in any way, as in taped together or similar, to create one big sheet. Yet when we see the last non-shaky-camera glimpse of the statue, what we see is a single giant sheet of plastic on her face. We also get to watch one of Geoff Konig's Alpha-1 crew-people laugh at the reactions of the tourists but the only reactions we get to see are very normal for tourists at Lady Liberty, they're photographing her. There is nothing in the tourists photo-snapping to alert us that something is very different with the statues face. Could they even see Saran Wrap from down there?

Add to that, nobody has reported on it. If activists actually made it up the head of Lady Liberty and did this, I would imagine miles of press being written about it. From right-wing-bloggers having heart attacks that just anyone can prance into and "deface" the statue of liberty with "where is the security we pay for" rants, to apolitical ad-bloggers like ourselves bowing down in awe at a stunt well done. Practically everyone from mom-bloggers to national press are reporting on the new security measures which would make things easier for tourists, and that's not even half as exiting as a defaced statue.

... and a helicopter? I dunno Howie, I almost landed on her head once back in the carefree days when Helicopter pilots could just swing by the Statue of Liberty to impress ten year old girls, but that kind of scenic route seems to require all sorts of permissions these days, from what I gather New Yorkers are still rather jumpy about low flying aircraft as Obama learned the hard way, so if a (much smaller) helicopter was going to do it, it would have to go through official channels and carry Navy Seals or similarly trained übermen to do the job. It would probably have to be a military helicopter too.

To top it all off, we have a website alpha-1incident.com, but the Saran Wrapped face doesn't alert us to this, the press hasn't written about it making the connection to this website, and there were no happy activists at the Statue of Liberty passing out flyers or similar to alert the tourists supposedly shocked by the Saran Wrapped Liberty to the alpha-1incident website. In short: no sender, no call to action.

Or really short: #fail

Oh, and for the too long, didn't read types.

The domain ALPHA-1INCIDENT.COM is owned by DIGITAL DRAFTFCB HEALTHCARE, and the technical and administrative contact is Andrew Wint, andrew.wint---draftfcb.com. He was working late on valentines day when he bought the domain, 14-Feb-2011. Not "beginning of january".

The last name Konig is pretty unusual in the states, whitepages says that there's only 3 named John Konig in the states, and in this fictional story we're supposed to have two in the same family. Dad John, and son John, brother of Geoff. Geoff Konig is a name-combo whitepages says there are exactly nil of. Not sure how much we can trust that directory, but I do know that all I can find on these names are brand new twitter and facebook accounts, complete with avatars that are photos from the day of filming this.

But there's some buzz now, they got it on Buzzfeed Disease Awareness Stunt Vandalizing the Statue of Liberty

Oh, and ShawnaRosen (good cop) and MrWizard64 (bad cop) both logged in with the same IP#. 69.114.128.67 just to call me stupid. HA HA HA!

They're not exactly hiding the campaign, @DraftfcbHealth even tweeted about it a few days ago, so I don't understand the feverish fight to try and "keep it real" as it were.