It’s with no small amount of embarrassment that I admit I sort of fell for LG’s fake adverts for Scarlet. I caught the end of one - part of a scene in which Natassia Malthe (aka Bloodrayne) walks out of an explosion, and then her eyes glow red, and the credits roll - and I believed it was, as it appeared, an advert for a new TV series.

And yesterday it turned out it was - just not in the way you’d expect. Instead of being a new drama about a secret agent or superhero or whatever, Scarlet turned out to be - drumroll! - a new range of LCD TVs. “TV series”, get it?

It’s like one of those jokes out of a Christmas cracker, where instead of laughing, you just groan. Admittedly, LG’s little prank is nowhere near as crushingly embarrassing as Sony’s All I Want For Christmas Is A PSP blog, and at least, unlike LonelyGirl15, LG actually has a product to sell us, but it still feels a bit, well, rubbish. Especially since lots of bloggers and forumgoers had already busted it, having checked out the IMDB and TV listings and having clocked the fact that there wasn’t any time or network information included in the ads. Moreover, having not been at the Hollywood launch, I’m now in the position of having seen the ads, but not what they’re actually selling - and while this advertising technique is admittedly clever, doesn’t it sort of imply there’s nothing particularly marketable about the TVs themselves?

Meh, maybe I’m just bitter about having been caught out. After all, Sony’s Bravia ads don’t exactly explain the exact specs of the TVs they’re trying to sell, and everyone loves those. Having rewatched the Scarlet ads again, there definitely is something off about them, something that implies they’re a spoof or a trick of some kind, so maybe if I’d been paying a bit more attention, I could have joined in the online speculation and enjoyed the playfulness of the campaign a bit more. The lesson here, then, is that I should watch more TV, in order to keep on top of this sort of thing…