Wired News calls Drew Black of GoldenPalace.com a PR mastermind in an article about their unorthodox marketing. Yeah, he is, kind of.
The company bids up prices on seemingly worthless eBay items such as the grilled cheese sandwich that looked like the Virgin Mary, for which they paid $28,000. And they paid $10K for a pretzel shaped like Mary holding the baby Jesus. I guess they are trying to attract holy rollers.
“The result is the sort of media coverage that Madison Avenue executives would kill for,” says Wired. “That’s very cheap,” said marketing professor Rashi Glazer of the University of California at Berkeley. “The cost of the PR they got could have been in the millions of dollars.” Yeah, but GoldenPalace’s plan is a one-trick pony.
The cooler part of the story is that GoldenPalace paid $650,000 to Wildlife Conservation Society when they auctioned off the right to name a new species of titi monkey. They named the monkeys Callicebus aureipalatii, Latin for golden palace titi monkey. And the Society gets to use the money to protecting the monkey’s habitat in Bolivia.
GoldenPalace.com Shoots for Holy Rollers and Does Good for Monkeys
BL Ochman | May 17, 2005 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) | TrackBack (
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“One-trick pony” or not, when it’s illegal to advertise your company, PR is the way to go. For whatever reason, US media loves to talk about wacky crap being sold on eBay. So kudos to Golden Palace for figuring out that buying a grilled cheese sandwich was worth hundreds of press mentions that reached millions. I know who they are now. Have no intent on ever using them, but I know who they are.
Also, I believe they may have been the first to pay pro boxers to have their URL written on boxer’s backs in magic marker. I’m not sure if that’s still allowed, but I recall that those backs make pretty effective billboards. And the demographic was probably pretty dead-on.