This is an excellent way to maximize marketing for a startup or a new business with a low budget, but only if you do it right or you may end up arrested or worse: serving jail time! The best example I know of personally went down so well it is now a case study in business and law facilities of some universities! Here is the story in their own words:
Yuppiechef holds Woolies Lovebird ransom (1 February 2010 as quoted in Yuppiechef's online Spatula Magazine):
So this weekend we were wandering through Woolworths and came across their exciting Woolies Lovebird competition, advertised throughout their national network of stores on big posters (thanks for the pic @TalyaGoldberg).
It really is an exciting competition, and we wanted in, so we went online to check it out: www.woolieslovebird.co.za…just as the poster says. But the URL was not registered. What they meant to write was www.woolieslovebirds.co.za. We can only assume that the hangovers from the Woolies New Year’s parties were the cause for this little oversight. So we did something sneaky: we registered it and now we’re holding it ransom.
To get it back, and have us point the address to their competition asap, we’re asking Woolies to match, rand for rand, all donations made towards our 2010 charity, Soil for Life, between now and Valentines Day (and to be nice, we’ll put a limit of R5000 on it). Sound good? Excellent. So we invite all our fans to go ahead and donate R25 or more to support a great cause and make Woolies pay or the lovebirds get it.
Amazingly, the stunt went down really well, Woolworths joined in the fun, the stunt got them more publicly and positive spinoff than the original campaign would have, Yuppiechef got over R50,000 donated to the Charity in just 2 weeks, were interviewed on CNBC Africa and featured in many other media, and later won a Lurie Advertising Award for their Chutzpah.
Way to go!
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