A Superbowl Commercial Marriage Proposal - And How We Can Help Make It Happen

I ran across the most interesting blog a little while back, MySuperProposal.com - there is this blogger – ‘JP’ who is attempting to raise money via his blog in order to buy a 30 second commercial spot during next year’s Superbowl on February 4^th. He doesn’t stop there, if by chance he goes over in his fund raising efforts or is picked up by an existing Superbowl advertiser – anything beyond his goal or 100% of the money raised not used for the commercial – will go to Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital - one of the top rated children’s hospitals in the nation. While at first I thought “Wow, that’s really neat, I hope this guy makes it and pulls it off”, I began to mull over the possibilities and how I would promote this because granted, this is an amazingly large project and in order for him to be successful, he would have to raise $2.5 million or generate enough buzz in both the blogosphere as well as through traditional channels.

Well, it worked for Alex Tews and his Million Dollar Homepage idea, he ended up raising $1,037,000.00 by selling pixels on his homepage creating such a buzz that traditional advertisers jumped into the fray and he ended up auctioning the final few pixels off on eBay. Then there was Kyle MacDonald and his One Red Paperclip blog where he aspired to ‘trade up’ to see what he might be able to get and he ended up doing a series of 14 trades culminated with him receiving as a final trade - a house in Canada.

So, I contacted ‘JP’ as he calls himself on his blog in order to protect his anonymity so that his girlfriend doesn’t find out his intentions and sent him a marketing plan that utilized every resource that I had learned over the past several years doing Internet marketing for a lot of very large web properties using techniques ranging from search engine optimization to Pay Per Click marketing to social media optimization to buzz marketing to traditional media advertising.

JP jumped at the idea, especially because part of my plan was to use this as a case study much like Jennifer Laycock’s very interesting study for the promotion of Lactivist.com where she attempted to see how much she could raise for breastfeeding awareness. I realize that I can’t do this alone but perhaps with a little help from my friends, I can help make JP’s dream a reality. I think that this would be an incredible case study to show Madison Avenue and traditional broadcast media the power of the search marketing community – after all this is the Superbowl and to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a search marketer who has undertaken promoting a project on a scale like this in a timeframe that this would require.

So my first thought was to determine if this kid is marketable – I mean, not to sound harsh, but to rally America behind JP, I needed to make sure that advertisers would jump on this as if JP were the next Jarrod from Subway, plus I wanted to be able to quell any critics, including the few posting ‘Is this a scam?’. I asked JP if he’d meet with me and I literally jumped the next available flight when we were both available (to an undisclosed location in America) so that we could meet and talk face to face. Once I got to my hotel, I shot JP a note and we arranged to meet in the hotel lobby. When JP arrived I sighed a collective sigh of relief – this kid was perfect! Traditional Baseball cap wearing, football jersey wearing, middle of the road average Joe so to speak and very marketable and a great personality to boot! Not only that but when he showed me pictures of his girlfriend she was as cute as a button! Ok, we had our story, now we had to kick start our plan.

So here I am calling out to my fellow search and Internet marketers to help make this incredibly difficult project a reality and of course by contributing, also helping a worthy cause – the Vanderbilt Children’s hospital. I’ll be showing progress on any marketer that wants to contribute whether it be funds, links, mentions, press releases whatever. JP has agreed to place a roster of those helping to get the word out on his site www.mysuperproposal.com and I’ll include all efforts in a journal both mentioned online as well as in a final document – maybe an ebook on how we collectively did a project this large. On last year’s Superbowl, Doritos received 400 million impressions from their commercial. I’m guessing that those of us who contribute and are listed will get an enormous amount of impressions based on this years 90 million viewership projections.

Let’s get started.

Joe Morin