Boony and Beefy. They talk to each other but is there a TV trigger?

This must be one of the greatest marketing ploys of all time. You go and buy a couple of "slabs" of VB (Victoria Bitter beer for the uninitiated) and this gives you the codes you need to buy a pair of plastic figurines of popular ex-cricketers David Boon and Ian Botham.

Set up in the room where you watch television, these will then make loud comments pertaining to cricket and VB. In other words, you pay money to buy a pair of dolls that will then advertise beer!

There’s even a web-site (www.boonanza.com.au) to promote the promotion and newsgroups have sprung up to log Boony’s and Beefy’s (Botham’s) comments and remarks. Their remarks are apparently spontaneous and they do interact. For example, if Boony asks Beefy to "Throw me a VB", Beefy answers, "Nah, you’ll only drop it".

We saw a press story on these figurines which indicated that the figurines were reacting to data signals sent during the TV broadcasts using a proprietary technique developed by US company Veil Interactive Technologies Inc. (www.veilinteractive.com)