Have you seen the Tru•Blood marketing campaign yet? The poster above has adorned the side of a bus shelter on Avenue A and 14th Street for about the past month. I was so convinced that this was a real advertisement (I mean, I do live in the East Village, and I actually know a couple of, shall we say, eccentrics who claim to be “Vampires”) that I’ve been asking everyone if they’ve seen this drink in stores.

As it turns out, this is just a bloody clever marketing ploy! The elaborate ad campaign designed to sell a synthetic blood beverage called Tru•Blood was created by none other than HBO as hype for its new TV series True Blood, which, as far as I can tell, is about the day when vampires decide to ‘come out’ of the casket (so to speak) and live normally among us. The Un-Dead can do this apparently thanks to the advent of the True Blood synthetic blood beverage, which will suffice in place of killing off and draining us mortals. Conveniently, the synthetic blood beverage drink comes in 4 flavors: A, B, AB and O. See more about the campaign at Trubeverage.com.