“Ha!” I can hear you saying, “Sell out!” But hold your tongue a minute. You have sold out yourself and got NIENTE in return. Have a look at the logos crawling around inside your wardrobe. You’re already advertising for companies. Worse, you’ve paid them for the priviledge! It’s time the tables were turned.

Idea #17: The Walking Advert

So how do you become a walking advert? Actually, with this idea I have some personal experience to draw on. Last winter I was working at the Green Tortoise Hostel, San Francisco. A bit short of cash, I devised the devious plan of creating an Ad Jacket.

Here’s how to make one:

1. Stick a sign on the back of your favourite jacket that reads:
   

…thus creating the Ad Jacket BASIC.

2. Walk around your chosen highly frequented venue as if you are going about your normal business (although secretely you are waiting for an approach).
3. Strike deals with advertisers who approach you, placing their adverts on another part of the jacket while leaving the original sign in place so as to attract more advertisers. The result is the Ad Jacket MAX:


Modelled by a real French girl

4. Find out further details about whatever you are advertising so you can inform interested parties.
5. You are now a fully-fledged walking advertisement. Move around your chosen venue wearing the Ad Jacket MAX as if you are going about your normal business.
6. When people stop to read what it says on your back, or just laugh at you, take the opportunity to inform them further about what on earth you are doing, moving slyly into a sales pitch for products you’ll earn a commission off.
7. Reap the rewards.

I found my personal experience of being a walking advert entirely fulfilling. From the moment I donned the Ad Jacket BASIC people were shooting subtle glances, making polite inquiries. It wasn’t long before I made my first deal, a sign that read:

Ask me about weed

That was a sign put on there by a gardener, but so excited was I by having struck my first commission-based deal, I ran off before he got a chance to write ‘ing’. Still, as it was, the sign made me a significant profit, for a negligible amount of work. I’d recommend it to everyone.

Here is a run down of the other ads I can recall having on my back by the time the ad jacket developed into an Ad Jacket MAX, and how I profited:

• “Genuine Limited Edition San Francisco Space Brownies” – commission-based, $1 per brownie referral
• “Ask me about haircuts” – a free haircut
• “Ask me about a gourmet dinner by a top chef” – a free gourmet dinner by a top chef
• “Martin S Gardea is the Greatest Living Artist on the Face of the Earth” - $22 advance placement fee
• “I’ll comb your hair till it’s so very, very soft” - approx. $5 for a limited period
• “Ask me about cheap beer and vodka” - an endless stream of income

Now these may look like slim pickings, but do not for a moment take the potential of the ad jacket lightly. If you truly have no shame, you could make a really big deal out of making yourself into a walking advert. Why not create a full ensemble of wacky ad clothes? Better still, do it with tattoos! Spread the word to the media that you are selling your whole body as advertising space, pull a few publicity stunts (more about these in a later post) and before you know it, you are THE AD MAN! Thereafter, all you need to do is make public appearances and watch the sponsorship money roll in…

If you fear embarking on such a harebrained project would be one of the biggest mistakes you could possibly make, why not make a sensible business out of it, like the gentlemen who developed the Ad Walker:

(Thanks Cool Business Ideas for finding this.)

You know what I mean?

To celebrate the milestone of reaching Idea #10, I’ve had a team of global allies in this enemyless war of ideas advertise the post on banknotes with the denomination of 10:

From Sunny Scotland; released in St. Andrews

From my motherland; released in Surrey

The exception that proves the rule; released somewhere in Holland (it's not that big)

Is this risky? Released in Shanghai anyway

(We’re still awaiting a picture of the US offering, although it may already be in circulation around San Francisco.)

I got inspiration for this idea – to advertise on money – from the highly recommendable book 365 Ways to Change the World by Michael Norton (as featured on the Ideas Exist Bookshelf). There, the idea proposed is to write a provocative fact on the banknote in order to promote a social cause. Ok, so I’ve made the idea a little more self-serving, but I want to investigate how effective advertising on banknotes really is, by directing recipients of the money to this page.

Anyway, just so I’m doing my bit to change the world, here are the suggestions for messages from the book plus links to relevant sites:

• 842 million people across the world will go to bed hungry  tonight.
• Guns kill 34,000 Americans every year.
• Wear a condom. Today 14,000 people will become infected with HIV/AIDS.
• One in five women experience rape or attempted rape in their lifetime. [Makes this anti-rape jacket  look like a good investment.]
• Perform a random act of kindness today.
• Give this money to someone who really needs it.
• Make amends to someone. Say sorry.
• Spread a little happiness. Smile at a stranger.

Given the amount of hands money passes through, using it was a way to advertise websites could be quite effective. Let’s just hope the people who daily spam this website don’t catch on or we’ll be forever dealing in notes covered in adverts for Russian Xanax. Ah well, the end of money  is nigh, anyway.

If you want to take part in this experiment, just send me a pic of a note like those above and I’ll put it on the site with a link to you.

Remember! If you got this address off a banknote, please leave a comment to let us know you were here! Let’s try to track where they go. I’ll put a map up if we get enough people. A map!

Some people see increasingly invasive advertising and marketing as being a negative trend. Future visions like this scene in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report fill many with a cold dread in so far as their future ventures into the outside world are concerned:

Not the most pleasant of shopping trips. But couldn’t invasive, targeted advertising could actually have positive side-effects for the person on the receiving end? Sound like a dream? Not one of mine. Perhaps one of yours?

Ever dreamt about emotion-targeted marketing?

Careful now. This idea might cause too violent a jolt in the region of your nervous system that deals with advertising. There’s a chance of that. Let’s just consider the background for a moment, to postpone such an event, should one be about to occur.

Basically, the reason advertising is getting more and more personal is that as individuals our connection to the world is becoming more and more intimate. Think about it, with newspapers our great-grandparents (or whatever) got access to a lot more information than before, but companies also found a new way into the homes of consumers.

With TV, advertisers were able to regularly exhibit their wares in our sitting rooms – they could even make sure it would be placed next to a programme their target market would be watching. Now, the internet’s context-related advertising (Google Ads, Facebook Ads) almost guarantees that we are shown ads that are relevant to us as individuals. Part of the reason it’s so successful is that it’s actually becoming more useful. You are getting links to things you might actually want!

But is that all we are – creatures of want, with tasks to perform? No! Let it not be said! We have emotional needs too, and this is something advertisers have not fully recognised.

Advertisers want to be your friend so they can sell you something. But real friends are not just people we think are cool, they also do things for us. Think about when you are feeling down, what do your friends do? They try to cheer you up, right? They don’t try to sell you a product.

This is the kind of thing advertisers need to learn how to do. And learn they will, I’m sure. Now’s your chance to get in there ahead of the pack.

All right, so here’s the idea – careful with that nervous system:

Idea #8: Emotion-targeted marketing. Create a spider program or Facebook app that harvests the email addresses of people who have blogged that they feel (for example) low, down, depressed etc. Send a bulk email to the email addresses, something like this:

Hi, we noticed you were feeling down.

Here’s something to cheer you up:

All the best,

Ideas Exist

Wouldn’t that be nice to get?

Wouldn’t you visit the advertiser’s website to see who had sent you such a considerate message?

Wouldn’t you tell your friends about it, and forward the whole email to them – plus the website link – if you thought the video was funny?

Yes.

Well, actually, let’s see. I sent the above email to some random people who blogged that they were feeling in a bad mood/feeling sad/feeling like shit. I just searched for the keywords manually on Google blogsearch rather than using a spider program to find thousands. (Actually, it was surprisingly difficult to find depressed bloggers over the past 12 hours!) 

Anyway, if you’re one of those people who received the email, hope it cheered you up a bit. It’d be great to hear your comments.

This idea was partially inspired by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s great internet art project We Feel Fine. Have a look.

If you just fancy spreading a little happiness, Acts of Kindness.org and linked Foundation for a better life have some inspiration and tools to help.

Or have a look at the esteemed Mr. Danny Wallace’s book:

The idea is simple: Arrange a public event to give money away. Whose money are you giving away? Not your own, that’s for sure. You haven’t got any. I mean I haven’t. Anyway, you’re giving away advertisers’ money. And taking an organiser’s fee for yourself.

This idea will work because everyone wants free stuff. If you doubt this read about the stampede that occurred when cooking oil was reduced by just over a dollar in a Chinese Carrefour. Yes, free stuff is great. And free money is the best free stuff there is. Your event will attract throngs of people who the advertisers will be able to expose themselves to while the punters are waiting to collect the cash. That’s the first reason advertisers will want to give their money away.

But probably more crucial for the advertisers is the wider media coverage the money giveaway event – and its sponsors – will receive. It’s almost certain to be the focus of quite a media buzz both before, during and after the event. (Read on for evidence…)

This idea is just a fresh application of the principle of corporate sponsorship. There is a ridiculous amount of money thrown around in this arena. For instance, the sponsorship deal between my home football club, Newcastle United, and Northern Rock Bank is reported to be around £25 million for five seasons. The difference in the money giveaway is that the companies are paying to sponsor the money giveaway event, and this money is just given directly to the consumers. This could be a more efffective system than traditional sponsorship for the following reasons:

1. People get desensitized to advertising. The more people that are exposed to traditional forms of advertising (such as logos and banners) the less effective it is. People’s attention is drawn to novel ideas.
2. The originality of the idea is the main media pull. If people were always giving money away, it wouldn’t make the news. But they aren’t, so it will. News is valuable advertising for companies. When you consider that a 30 second slot on a major US television network costs upwards of $100,000, you’ll understand why it’s quite valuable to be the focus of a three-minute news item on several channels. (The Million Dollar Homepage is a great example of the power of an original idea to draw advertisers.)
3. People will form positive psychological associations with the advertisers at this event. Why? Because the businesses are giving them money for a change!
4. The money giveaway event provides a good opportunity for advertisers to interact with consumers, so that they will have more of an experience of the brand. This could include entertainment, free samples, competitions etc.
5. The money giveaway is just the next stage in a general trend towards advertisers giving more to consumers in order to draw them in – almost a necessity in today’s hyper-competitive market.

I first came up with this idea a few months ago. I was then pretty surprised when, the very next day, I turned on the TV and saw that a man calling himself Bailout Bill was doing it in Times Square, New York! Here’s an article about it from the New York times:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/free-cash-in-times-square-latest-marketin-ploy/

And here you can see how much publicity the events got:

https://www.bailoutbooth.com/index.php?action=Press

Seems to work, right? Give it a go!