The Disney-Industrial Complex debuts its animated feature Planes next month.

So this month it launched a stealth marketing campaign that hijacks AOL’s Patch franchise.

From MediaBistro’s FishbowlNY:

 

Latest Patch Site is Hyper-Fictitious

And, in this anniversary month of the death of Walter Cronkite, Propwash Junction Patch is being edited by Windy Kronkite, no less.

She and the entire site are fake. Although Propwash Junction Patch looks and feels like every other recently redesigned Patch site, it’s actually a clever rich content ad for Disney’s August 19 animated feature Planes.

Links to the fake Patch, like the one above, are being embedded across real Patch sites.

 

Sounds like AOL now stands for Any Old Link. Further proof:

 

[A]ccording to Patch senior vp of advertising and marketing Mark Josephson, there could be more of these endeavors in the near future. He told Ad Age for example that a North Pole Patch “wouldn’t be a stretch.”

 

That’s some nasty Patch work, eh?

 

John R. Carroll is media analyst for NPR's Here & Now and senior news analyst for WBUR in Boston. He also writes at Campaign Outsider and It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
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