There's really two stories here:
1. A Secret/Teaser GM Advertising campaign has been hacked.
2. GM apparently will include OnStar as standard equipment on all vehicles.
Has anyone actually seen these billboards?
=======================================================
CNET.COM
Can an advertising campaign based on a teaser survive after its secret has been let out?
The marketing team at General Motors hopes so, after some Web surfers spoiled a national promotion that was intended to gradually reveal a secret message.
Under the campaign, which is about half completed, each day a billboard in a different part of the country divulges a word (or a punctuation mark) in a message. A billboard in Arlington, Texas, for example, says "you." One in New York City shows a period.
The billboards also promote a Web site on which GM explains that it created the campaign to spread "a message so important we need the whole country to tell it."
But some Web visitors quickly found that most of the "secret" message is included in the site's source code.
In a posting on the site's bulletin boards, a Web surfer using the name "J1mmy" wrote that the message was: "This is the last time you will ever have to feel alone on our nation's roadways."
The meaning, J1mmy speculated, was that all new GM vehicles would soon be equipped with OnStar, the factory-installed safety and communications system that is already available in many models.
"They did crack the code," said Rob Peterson, a communications manager at GM. "We expected it to be solved, we just didn't expect it to be solved in this manner."
Although J1mmy and other sleuths did not crack a second, shorter sentence that is part of the message, they clearly took glee in beating the system as much as they had.
"Lol, how sad," another visitor wrote. "They left all the words right out in the open, waiting for someone to either use an SWF Scanner or Hex Editor to find the words. Encrypt it for us next time, give us a challenge, lol."
The promotion continues through the end of the month.
1. A Secret/Teaser GM Advertising campaign has been hacked.
2. GM apparently will include OnStar as standard equipment on all vehicles.
Has anyone actually seen these billboards?
=======================================================
CNET.COM
Can an advertising campaign based on a teaser survive after its secret has been let out?
The marketing team at General Motors hopes so, after some Web surfers spoiled a national promotion that was intended to gradually reveal a secret message.
Under the campaign, which is about half completed, each day a billboard in a different part of the country divulges a word (or a punctuation mark) in a message. A billboard in Arlington, Texas, for example, says "you." One in New York City shows a period.
The billboards also promote a Web site on which GM explains that it created the campaign to spread "a message so important we need the whole country to tell it."
But some Web visitors quickly found that most of the "secret" message is included in the site's source code.
In a posting on the site's bulletin boards, a Web surfer using the name "J1mmy" wrote that the message was: "This is the last time you will ever have to feel alone on our nation's roadways."
The meaning, J1mmy speculated, was that all new GM vehicles would soon be equipped with OnStar, the factory-installed safety and communications system that is already available in many models.
"They did crack the code," said Rob Peterson, a communications manager at GM. "We expected it to be solved, we just didn't expect it to be solved in this manner."
Although J1mmy and other sleuths did not crack a second, shorter sentence that is part of the message, they clearly took glee in beating the system as much as they had.
"Lol, how sad," another visitor wrote. "They left all the words right out in the open, waiting for someone to either use an SWF Scanner or Hex Editor to find the words. Encrypt it for us next time, give us a challenge, lol."
The promotion continues through the end of the month.
![[burnout]](/images/smilies/icon_smile_burnout.gif "Burnout [burnout]"){kind=icon}
![[:p]](/images/smilies/tongue.png "Stick Out Tongue [:p]")
