Well, this is unprecendented. I know that I usually never post twice in one day, but I had news so big that I had to share it with you.

I have cracked the Pherotones puzzle!

First, a little bit of background. A few weeks back, I posted a review of a few ringtones on the Pherotones site, ringtones that supposedly attracted people of the opposite sex. The site’s run by a “Dr. Myra Vanderhood,” who just as quickly emailed me to let me know she thought my research was great, and asked to post it. Which is what she did.

Before I say anything else, I have to say that she was very nice to me. No matter what she was roleplaying, she was extremely kind to me in emails.

Now, when I first saw the site, I figured it was some kind of hoax or viral ad, and it turns out that, thanks to the work of a few other sites, it was discovered that’s exactly what it was.

The only question, then, is who exactly is Pherotones a viral ad for?

This evening, I decided to check back on the Pherotones blog and see if they’d revealed anything. They haven’t. Not anything about who the ad is for, anyway. So I Googled around a bit and read up on it.

Then I found this post on the MAKE blog. A commenter named darrylsmith (I couldn’t find his blog, though he says he has one) posted this:

It would appear that the company doing this MIGHT be McKinney Silver. Strangely I posted a link in my blog about this and got a number of hits almost immediately from them.

If you look at the Pherotones.COM domain information you will notice it is registered to North Carolina which is where McKinney Silver is located too.

McKinney-Silver is the company behind the ads. I don’t know how “darrylsmith” got that file listing, but check it out. “Clients\\OASYS.” OASYS, eh? Somebody call Google!

And sure enough, a few pages in on the “OASYS” Google search, you get Oasys Mobile, a site that sells phone games and ringtones.

Who’s behind the Pherotones ads? Oasys Mobile.

Now, I’m not naive. I know that repeating their name gets them the press they need. And I don’t know where “darrylsmith” got his information, or how he got ahold of what looks like a file listing on one of their network drives– for all I know, he himself is a McKinney-Silver plant, just another cog in the wheel.

But then you look at Oasys’ story, and they’re a fairly new cell company with a lot of financial backing. And they’re based out of NC, the same place “darryl” says McKinney-Silver is from. And Oasys’ website just screams that they’re ready to spend plenty of money on marketing to the Internet.

So maybe I’m wrong. But I doubt it.

Update: I found Darryl Smith’s blog. He is definitely not a McK-S plant. Apparently (I didn’t realize the comments on the Make blog were listed backwards), he had content copied from his site, and threatened to sue McK-S over it, and got a nice little apology letter for his trouble. He mentions on the Make page that he found their fileserver through a Javascript that he runs.

Update II: As of 2/15, Pherotones is declaring that they’ve set up an “exclusive distribution deal” with Oasys Mobile to sell pherotones, and Oasys is declaring the same thing on their site. Which means I was exactly right. Booyah!