Conan O’Brien Turns To Foursquare To Promote New Show, Launches His Own Badge

I’ll admit it, I’m a big fan of Conan O’Brien and can’t wait for his show to come back on the air.  I also have to give credit to O’Brien and crew for their recent use of social media and other new-age marketing mediums to promote the new show — and himself — ever since going off air amid the Tonight Show fiasco.

Case in point, Team Coco, in partnership with AT&T, has launched the The Conan Blimp, which was launched into the skies above Philadelphia over the weekend.  The bright orange blimp will travel all over the East Coast for the entire month of October with the simple graphic “CONAN” plastered on each side.  While in flight, any Conan fan that sees it can check-in to Foursquare to unlock a special Conan bandge.

The blimp is accompanied by its very own website complete with a live cam and an always-updating map, allowing die-hard fans to track its every move.  Albeit strange and likely an expensive undertaking, the campaign will likely do what it was designed to do, which is promote the fact that Conan is finally coming back, in a big way.  Foursquare told Mashable that the startup’s participation in the campaign was orchestrated by Jonathan Crowley, sibling to Co-founder Dennis Crowley and the man at the company handling media partnerships of late.

“The blimp-badge partnership is also an interesting indicator of how location, checkins and entertainment marketing can go hand-in-hand,” Mashable said in its post on the subject.  I fully understand that many people still don’t get the concept behind Foursquare, but the marketing power it possesses is huge — it will just take large-scale partnerships like this one to make them known.