» I’m not chocolate

I’ve been asked on several occasions to recount my most memorable experience in interactive advertising.  Since the start of my career in 1997, I’ve seen a lot of crazy things happen, however, nothing tops the experience I had just shortly after Hurricane Katrina.  My client and good friend now, Shawn Burst, asked me to help out a friend of his, Dolph Frederico.  When I called Dolph, he told me about this crazy t-shirt idea he had regarding Ray Nagin subsequent to his speech on rebuilding New Orleans.

In case you don’t remember he wanted to rebuild a “chocolate New Orleans” and said, “you can’t have New Orleans no other way.”  As you can imagine, it caused a public uproar.

Skeptical about the idea, I decided to help him out anyways in order build my relationship with Shawn’s company.  We built him a 1 page website and wrote a press release to submit over the wire.  We use a service called EReleases.com.  I highly recommend them, they have a very good reach especially in the blogsphere.

Two hours after submitting the press release and launching the website, our hosting company called to inform us that we had a received a surge of traffic like they had never seen before.  It was like one of those pre-dot-com bomb commercials you used  to see on t.v.  Orders started to pour in by the thousands and we received over 1 million uniques in just under 48 hours. It was quite the spectical.  It all started with a article on the homepage of CNN, following a call from Saturday Night Live who used the shirt in their opening skit and finally us having to tell Jay Leno’s office when they called that we were out of t-shirts.  I’d never seen anything like it and the calls were flooding our office since I had listed myself as the press contact.

To this date, I always tell people, if you come up with the right idea, it will sell itself. You don’t have to do very much.