Three weeks prior to launch, I was at the Wednesdays.com
office discussing what we should do for our launch. Our PR consultant upon checking into our
office on foursquare discovered that we were located right next to tech
publications GigaOM, Wired and CNET.
That's when she suggested we hang a giant banner announcing our launch
outside the office to catch the attention of passing journalists. The idea was good, but it just did not have
enough pizazz for me. Instead, I
suggested that we buy pizza, put our logo on the box as well as a message
inside along the lines of “Wasn’t eating lunch together fun? Now do it more
often at Wednesdays.com. We launch today!” The proverbial icing to this idea
would be that us to delivering the pizzas in person so that we could pitch
directly to the journalists.
It was an idea that was inspired by the story of how the
AirBnB founders sold rebranded generic cheerios as Obama O’s at the Democratic
National Convention in order to keep their company running. My PR stunt idea resonated with the founder Hugh
and I began to flesh out the idea more.
First order of business was to figure out how to brand the
pizza boxes. I played with the idea of
printing custom boxes but that was quickly shelved when I discovered the
costs. Instead, I settled on just printing
stickers which were cheap and had a quick turnaround time. If the pizzeria did not have blank boxes, I
figured I could get them at Costco and if that did not work out I could put the
sticker over the pizzeria logo. Finding the pizzeria was the easy part with the
help of Yelp.
Our PR consultant pointed out that the publications we were
targeting were mainly staffed by bloggers and freelancers who were not
regularly in the office. “No worries” I
wrote her, I will just tweet them all that Wednesdays.com wanted to buy them
lunch this coming Wednesday. So I built
up Twitter lists of TC, CNET, Wired and GigaOM writers with the intention of
tweeting them all to get them to be in the office on launch day.
The whole project was going to by estimates cost around
$1000 with 40 giant 18” pizzas going out to 4 offices. A small price to pay for the potential to be
in publications that combined reached well over a million people. In my mind, I reasoned that doing this stunt
gave the journalists two possibilities for writing about Wednesdays.com, the
fact that they would find the service innovative or conversely the stunt
innovative enough to write about. Either
way I would get Wednesdays.com noticed.
As the pieces of the stunt started falling into place, the
only thing I worried about was how to get past security. Scenarios of me finessing my way past the
security guard and pitching to an office full of bloggers swam around in my
mind up to the day before launch.
Alas, in the end we got contacts in the publications so a
last minute PR blitz was not necessary to get coverage for our launch. My grand idea was shelved the day before
launch and all the prepartion was for naught.
However, it makes one hell of a blog post.
