Up Your Budget Treasure Hunt Has Players Obsessed

I haven't been blogging regularly because I am crazy busy directing The Up Your Budget Treasure Hunt campaign, which is in its fourth week. The campaign, which has gone viral, has already given away $110K to people who managed to find a 2" sticker in 11 different cities and call an 800 number to claim their prize. The campaign ends just before Thanksgiving, after a re-match in San Diego.

It's an enormous learning experience to be using blogs the way we are, and to see how enthusiastically people respond to a challenging game. Many thousands of people are playing and following the hunt each week. There will, of course, be metrics and a ton of analysis when the campaign is done, but right now it is a lot of fun and an absolutely astounding amount of work.

Players, who admit they have become obsessed, are flying to distant cities to compete, riding Greyhound buses and driving all night to crawl around under benches, signs and planters looking for the stickers, which they find by watching daily video clues and reading clues throughout the Up Your Budget blogs.

At 3:30 a.m. in San Francisco last Friday "a scramble … descended, on foot, car, bicycle seeking the sticker. A swarm of people arrived on Bethune Street in New York. And two San Francisco hunters made a wonderful video spoof of the daily clue videos by "the clue studs."

Jason Kaiser made my favorite comment last week when he wrote: "I felt like Doris Day searching Ambrose Chapel in 'The Man Who Knew Too Much'..."