Blogging A-lister Doc Searls writes about Brandy, a 21 year old mum, auctioning off her forehead to advertisers.
Last April Fool day, a bunch of colleagues and I were fooling around with some press release ideas. We came up with the concept of a group of desperate entrepreneurs who offered to tattoo their foreheads (permanently) if their website traffic hit a certain figure.
The idea was that this was a last ditch attempt to save their company which their VC’s were about to close down.
Desperate Entrepreneurs Agree to Anus Tattoo on Foreheads
The team behind TagText are in big trouble. Their VC backers have threatened to close the company down, following “one of the most disappointing website launches ever.” Despite spending significant sums on marketing, virtually no one has visited the site, “if you discount friends and relatives of the founders”.
To counter this, the team have agreed to a blatant and frankly desperate publicity stunt. Depending on the number of people who visit www.tagtext.com, Ben, Nick and Russell have agreed to a series of increasingly obscene tattoos, in increasingly public places.
The humiliation starts at 10,000 visitors, when Ben, Nick and Russell will get a TagText logo discretely applied to their inner thigh. But the more visitors, the higher the stakes, until for 100,000 visitors, they pledge to get a puckered anal sphincter indelibly carved into their foreheads.
“It’s a kind of frying pan or fire situation” says Ben philosophically. “We lose our company or we have perfect strangers pointing and laughing at us for the rest of our lives. I wish I could say that I have the full support of my wife, but I haven’t dared tell her yet.”
“Yes” adds Russell “it’s a pretty weird situation. One half of me wants the site traffic obviously. But on balance, I’d really urge you not to go. Well, 10,000 I can cope with, but frankly, 100,000 would be my worst nightmare. How do you think my kids would feel if they have a Dad with an arsehole tattooed on his head?”
TagText offers free downloadable characters for mobile phones.
“We’re still trying to work out a business model” says Nick. “But lots of website traffic has got to be a great start, right?”
We talked to a pal in PR, who rubbished the idea and said it was totally unbelievable. Well, Brandy isn’t the first case of life imitating “art” and won’t be the last either.
On the other hand, maybe our PR chap was referring to the fact that we’d have VC’s investing in the first place as the “unbelievable” part….
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