Did Olympus hire the ad agency that Nikon used back in the D40/D80 days?
On the day I was flying home, Olympus partnered with Jet Blue and gave everyone on a JetBlue NYC to Fort Lauderdale flight an Olympus E-PM1 (complete with a cute Olympus bag and I'm Pen Ready t-shirt (and is that phrase just a conjunction of Nikon's I Am campaign? Nikon: I am fill-in-the-blank. Olympus: I'm fill-in-the-blank.). You can see the--I hope preliminary--results of the project here. Had I been on the flight, I'm not sure what I'd have done with another Pen--I was already carrying three ;~).
After criticizing Olympus recently for not having a tangible marketing slogan that gets across the m4/3 difference, it appears that they appear to now have one (and it's not I'm Pen Ready): Pack Small. Shoot Big. Finally, and just in time for Nikon to announce a smaller camera that'll likely hit the same buttons.
As for the hyperbole on the penready.com site, no, it is not a project that's never been seen before. Giving away cameras to see what happens has been done at least three times that I know of, and I'm sure plenty more times than that. I also think Olympus should have started hyping this--excuse me, building exceitement--before they started the giveaways (although apparently there are more to come), as in "Are You Ready to Pack Small and Shoot Big? We're giving away 1000 Pen cameras to find out. Are you Pen Ready?" You want people hoping they'll be one of the chosen few and looking to see what's happening, not just learning about what the chosen few did.
So far the resulting images from new users aren't quite the level of Nikon's Flickr giveaway, but one can hope. I can report that it isn't the camera that's the problem ;~).