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.
So let me get this straight- a camera feed to a (clever) domain name shows a slab of cheese aging (which isn’t much tv action), Millions of people come to watch and now after a year they are going to make $500 for all the pr it generated- doesn’t seem like a business plan to me.
Now by contrast I know where there is a security cam feed that you can watch a hotel room that Pamela Anderson is known to frequent wtih special guests. So far in two years, I haven’t caught her, but what I’ve seen is a lot more interesting then a slab of cheese.
***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
Yes, but they made a $xx slab of cheese worth close to $1k with 5 days left. It also made CNN, NY Post, and a bunch of other news outlets. They’ve made more business than ever just be registering this name and promoting it using guerilla marketing techniques….. AND, we are discussing it. I think its brilliant.
Elliot, maybe on a future post you can explain:
Shill bidding, typical scamming and the such.
Is there a way we can avoid this if it happens to me?
Is there a way to expose this if it happens to me?
thanks, Ed – Michigan