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An English cheesemaker has capitalized on a great marketing campaign by auctioning off a slab of cheese that had been the focus of 24 hour web television coverage seen by visiting cheddarvision.tv. After receiving over 1.65 million views on the website since December of 2006, and countless other views on its dedicated Myspace page, the 44 pound block of cheese is now listed for sale on Ebay.

This has to be one of the smartest interactive marketing campaigns I’ve seen in a while. The cheesemakers created interest for the past year using a .tv website, a Myspace page and a YouTube listing, and now they are using their website to direct interested viewers to the auction. The bidding is currently up to £520.00, and I can only hope that the typical scammers that place shill bids leave this auction alone.

I was with a friend last night discussing the advantages of interactive marketing. There are far too many to name, but I think the ability to be creative is one of the most compelling reasons, followed by the opportunity for viral messaging (peer to peer). One problem some people have is finding trustworthy partners who can produce top quality material. It’s true that the really good people are always busy working on other projects. The key is to engage them ahead of time and not expect a finished product overnight.

I hope to give more insight in future posts, but I wanted to share a great campaign my friend created while working at his former advertising agency. His task was to introduce the Philips Bodygroom shaver to the American market.

His campaign won a ton of creative awards, including:
The One Show Interactive: Gold Award (2007)
Clio Interactive: Gold (2007)
Art Directors Club: Distinctive Merit (2007)
Webby Awards: Webby Award & People’s Voice (2007)
Cannes Cyber Lions: Gold (2006)
The FWA: Site of the Year (2006)
The FWA: Site of the Month (2006)
The FWA: Site of the Day (2006)
Design Interact: Site of the Week (2006)
Advertising Age: Digital Campaign of the Year (2006)

Check it out when you have a chance:
http://shaveeverywhere.com/

And if you want to get in touch with my friend for your interactive marketing needs, let me know. He now works for a highly creative firm that can help make a big impact on your marketing.

On October 3, I blogged about the United States Postal Service’s campaign to make consumers aware of threats posed by scammers. In that post, I said that the campaign was great, but “the USPS should never have used a .org domain name where the .com is taken. If they needed to have that specific .org, they should have bought the .com for whatever it cost.” Well, as it turns out, the USPS did buy FakeChecks.com the following day. According to the Whois History service, they utilized the services of Sedo on 10/4, and it now shows the USPS as current owners.

Congratulations to the USPS for “getting it” both figuratively, and for litterally getting it, by purchasing the name they needed much more than the previous owner. Now all they need to do is forward that URL to FakeChecks.org, as the .com currently shows a “Welcome to Your New Virtual Private Server!” message.

My father has been in the home fashions business for his entire life, and he has owned his store in New Hampshire since 1984. Although he has a 3,000 square foot store, custom window treatments, which take up about 20% of the store, generate about 80% of the business.

On occasion, I would hear my father complain about companies that would advertise their window treatment “stores” in the Yellow Pages, when in fact, they operated out of a van. While nothing can really replace the comfort of going into a store, working with a knowledgeable sales clerk and purchasing a product, the people who run their van-stores are onto something. They have little to no inventory, they outsource what they can’t do, and they have no physical overhead except van maintenance.

This is a great business model that should be applied to domain names in the form of a PPS (pay per sale) store. Many domain investors have few connections with product manufacturers. Likewise, most product manufacturers have few connections with domain owners. What we need is for a middle man development company to be created to form relationships with product manufacturers and domain owners to create custom stores where the domain owner only has to change his DNS. No templates to mess with, no customer service call center to train, no more work than a standard PPC page. If the domain owner wants to enhance is site(s), the templates should have the ability to add content to make them more unique to build brand loyalty and encourage customers to return. This is similar to what Joe Davison was talking about in the “Niche-Specific Stores” section of his July post

I think this is one way in which PPC aggregators will evolve into PPS aggregators. Current web advertisers will be happy when they are paying on a net sale basis rather than on a per click basis. Domain owners will be compensated nicely because the value of a customer would drastically increase.   The PPS aggregators would be happy to receiving a % of all sales. I believe this is much more beneficial to all parties.

There are some domain owners/investors who already do something similar, and I think they have a great business model.   The idea behind this post is for something that can be applied to everyone who owns a domain name on a large scale rather than a few companies who are well ahead of the game.

Below are a few unregistered domain names I believe have good potential. Although I am not charging anything for researching these names, I am requesting that the person who registers each makes a donation to a non-profit organization.

AircraftCharterRental.com
AlcoholPermitConsultants.com
ClippingBureaus.com
BridalCouturier.com
FilingConsultants.com
FloodControlEquipment.com
HistoricalOrganizations.com
MailReceivingService.com

You don’t need to tell me how much was donated, but I would love to know which charity was helped, so please drop me a line after!

A few non-profits I recommend (with the link to make a donation):

Dana Farber Cancer Institute
ALS Association
The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation
Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure for Breast Cancer
Simon Wiesenthal Center
Meir Panim
American Cancer Society
Turning Point (Domestic Violence Organization)

Charities Previously Helped By Generous Readers of My Blog:

The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation
Simon Wiesenthal Center
Dana Farber Cancer Institute
ALS Association
Cystic Fibrosis Foundation

Yesterday I blogged about the USPS’ new anti-scam campaign directing people to FakeChecks.org. The whole point of my post wasn’t to criticize the Postal Service – I think the campaign is smart and the message is good. However, I believe there is a good chance many viewers will end up on the wrong website, not owned by the USPS.

A perfect example can be found on the KETV 3 website, a Santa Barbara news station. Directly from their website:

“According to the US Postal Service, scam victims lose $3,500 on average and are often responsible to repay banks for the money lost. The Post Service met with officials and residents to issue warnings and give tips on how you can avoid being scammed. The US Postal Service and Postal Inspection Service have set up a website at www.fakechecks.com so you can report fraudulent activity.”

Whether we like it or not, many people automatically assume a domain name is a .com no matter what the extension is. This confusion could potentially lead people to the wrong website, as can be seen by this inadvertant news article.