Archive for January, 2009

(Via: Direct Daily)

So how effective can you really be with literally zero budget and guerrilla marketing? In order to promote a campaign about children and HIV, a non-profit organization in Germany named AJS showed that with the right creative tools promoting your cause is feasible under these circumstances!

They spread 144 statues representing kids affected with HIV around in a populated area in order to raise public awareness of the epidemic. Each statue had a mini story to tell and these “kids” could be adopted symbolically by making a donation. This guerrilla marketing campaign was a great way not only to build awareness for the organization amongst individuals, media types, and local businesses, but also people responded well to the cause.

This was a great use of the outdoor space and of symbolism.

Last year looked a bit like this in Chicago. This year it’s a little colder, so I was definitely looking forward to escaping to San Francisco for the weekend of The Crunchies.

There’s a great quote from last year at some point during the Microsoft/Yahoo takeover activity – “For $44B you could acquire every startup from 2005-2008, including Facebook at its $14b inflated valuation.” It’s a very thin layer of the economy. I’ve joked about it a little but I’ve been insulated from it here in the midwest – the mood is grim in Silicon Valley; the financial issues from late August have trickled down to angel and VC activity. And never had I really felt that as much as at The Crunchies.

The usual suspects, the Facebooks of the sector, won the awards – no real surprises. There was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the first 3/4 of the show – although maybe that was b/c there weren’t drinks available at the event until the afterparty? The reception in the capitol rotunda was beautiful and grand – almost too much for the current climate.

But it’s all good – this is when it gets real again. This is where it gets exciting. The flood of web2.0 business models will trend toward quality and the sustainable after the last few years of dot-com-like enthusiasm because they’ll have to. Or they’ll end up in the deadpool.

StartupSchwag has been a cheerleader for this; a fun surprise means of connecting with the startups we know and have grown to love. I brought the service back for that connection and that connection is going to get stronger as we start to be able to determine which startups are going to make it on their own, which will go the way of Pownce and which will simply, quietly fade away.

And the next big thing? Semantic? Mobile? It’s started. The services that survive an prosper in this climate are the fighters. We’re excited to do everything we can to help promote any and all, to reach out and raise the signal wherever our subscribers wear tshirts or their laptops sport stickers (which are back in the bags, btw =) ). We’re in this for the long haul =)

Let me know who you want to wear and support. I’ll see what we can do.

A belated Happy New Year.

We’ll be shipping tomorrow.

Best,

-Roddy

Check out Paw Fun, an Obama pet spoof site which, aside from selling t-shirts, will let you put your pet in the White House. Figuratively speaking, of course.

Hi from Philly!
I just returned from Paris, France, where ASI senior vice president and I spent the weekend after the fabulously successful PSI Show in Dusseldorf.
France is my favorite place in the world, and Paris is my favorite city, so the cloud of snark and sass that usually envelopes me dissipated, and I was in [...]

Elle Baché skincare did a guerrilla marketing campaign where they made a gigantic female out of sweet peaches, placed her somewhere in the middle of Sydney Harbor, Australia, and declared she had “Skin Good Enough To Eat!” I am assuming after a while she’d become all wrinkly, bruised and icky looking and the birds started picking at her but while the campaign lasted it was perceived as a spectacle that was quite quirky and intriguing. This is an interesting direction taken in order to promote skincare.