Discarded Pingdom marketing campaigns.
Pingdom.com is currently offering a one-year trial of its uptime monitoring service for 40 tiny little cents. A gimmick, you say? Of course it is. We could have offered it for free, but by making people pick up a credit card, even for such a miniscule amount, they become potential customers later on (as opposed to little Jimmy from Minnesota, 12 years old.)
So what made us go with 40 cents in the first place? The original price was $119.40. We just chopped off the dollars. Of course, the day after we launched the 40-cent campaign, we realized that one dollar would probably have been easier to play around with. “One year, one dollar,” and so on. Here’s to lost opportunities.
But this post is not about good ideas. It’s about those marketing ideas that come up, but are discarded for some reason (the word “over-enthusiastic” comes to mind. “Deranged” also comes up.) We had some marketing ideas we played around with to push the word out on the 40-cent deal, most of which, as these things tend to be, were rejected by people with actual common sense. We thought we’d share a couple of these ideas with you. Feel free to use them for your own campaigns. We never will.
4-dime fliers
This sounded great at first. Put together 10,000 fliers with 4 dimes glued to each, with the Pingdom logo and URL on the other side. We actually thought seriously about this for a while, until we started to question our ability to come up with 40,000 dimes and gluing them to fliers, and the manpower to distribute this. And how much does 40,000 dimes weigh anyway? Flight tickets (our main office is in Sweden), hotel stays, the inevitable littering fines, etc. It all racked up, and although it would surely be popular with the homeless people, we canned the idea.
Robbing 50 Cent
We figured, steal 10 cents from 50 Cent (the rapper). That would make him 40 Cent, see? Yes, we know it’s a silly idea. But it’s also strangely appealing, and it’s logical, in a very geeky kind of way. The scenarios however, were less attractive. Considering the man has already been shot a number of times, his bodyguards would most likely swat us like screaming Swedish mosquitos before we even got near him. And legalities aside, who really thinks 50 Cent even touches dimes anymore? He probably uses gold and 100-dollar bills to wallpaper his mansion(s?). Bling-bling and all that. Final reason not to do this: Don’t mess with a gangsta.
