Effective Marketing is an occasional series about uniquely clever, remarkable, or, just plain effective marketing campaigns.

Last month I attended the Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Film Festival, presented by the local Seattle treasure EMP/SFM. The Cinerama theater has thankfully chosen not to bombard its customers with a loud stream of commercials like so many other movie chains; they instead opt for the less intrusive pre-feature slideshow.

As you can imagine for such an event, the audience–including me–was a crowd of geeks, which made us especially receptive to the Battlestar Galactica ad that came up on the screen. After seeing it, the two guys to my right began talking about the show; one was a big fan, while the other knew of the show but hadn’t seen it yet, and wondered aloud if he should rent it from the beginning. I chimed in that it was indeed an excellent show, and we all started to talk about it. While we were chatting, the guy who hadn’t seen the show took out his iPhone, logged on to Netflix, and added the first three seasons of the show to the top of his rental queue. Attention, interest, decision, action — all right there from our seats!