Monday, September 19, 2005

Online Celebrity Auction for charity is also test-case for blog marketing

First things first:

HP is sponsoring an auction on eBay to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It is comprised of recent, autographed photographs from some of today's biggest stars.

How it came about it an interesting story of applying branding and marketing to a good cause.

Every year Toronto hosts a film festival in September, and for the last few years HP has sponsored taking portraits of the stars to help promote their films around town. The studios and actors want the films promoted. HP gets branding on the poster and photos. Plus HP hopes the studios become familiar with their cool photographic product line and that they get some cinematic product placement as a result.

This year they though, why not take those posters and photos, have them autographed and auction them off post-festival. Its a win-win-win for all involved. from the actors to the studios to HP.

How they're marketing it now is an interesting story of how you can still execute a marketing campaign within days, not months, thanks to blogs and other online community software.

That story is told in full on Susan Getgood's blog here. Suffice to say with this auction only lasting days there's not a lot of time to create print ads or a big campaign...they're going to straight to blogs and to celebrity fan forums and communities.

And I guess I'm part of the experiment by posting about it here.

So check out the auction and do some good today.

Comments: Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?