Comedy Central is launching a cryptic marketing campaign to promote the May 29 fifth-season premiere of Daniel Tosh’s Tosh.0. The barrage of messianic messages — the most extensive promo push the network will undertake this year — includes positioning tunic-wearing “followers” with “Tosh 5.29” signs at baseball games and sending “recruiters” to beaches and parks in New York and Los Angeles during Memorial Day weekend to hand out pamphlets and bracelets, an allusion to the proselytizing custom of Scientology. “When you have a star of this magnitude with fans that are as rabid as his, it really gives you license to go outside the norms of the typical TV campaign,” says Walter Levitt, executive vp marketing at Comedy Central. Tosh.0 is the network’s highest-rated show, averaging 3.7 million viewers for the recently wrapped fourth season. And Tosh himself has inspired a fervent adherence among his young, mostly male and social network-connected fans, with more than 8 million “likes” on Facebook and 5.5 million Twitter followers. In a fortuitous bit of timing, Tosh turns 37 on May 29. At the bottom of danieltosh.com, there’s a countdown that expires on his 38th birthday, at which point he has said, “I’ll either put a bullet in my head or just retire to a beach somewhere.”
