Pennies as Ad Mediums

Luckvertizing is a term coined by Zoomdoggle.com who affixed the tail sides of 5,000 pennies with tiny messages of luck and their own URL. After about 50 hours of cutting and pasting, they distributed the coins all around NYC, head side (lucky side) up, in areas like Williamsburg, The East Village, Soho and Nolita.

The clever, $50 guerrilla campaign seems to have actually worked.

"Advertising online starts at about a nickel per click," the site explains. "This cost just one cent per message. The metrics don't quite add up that way, but the face remains, yesterday (the day we spread the luck) was out best traffic day yet. That said, it was well worth the effort. From here on out we'll be distributing $5 in pennies per week. That's 500 hand-labeled coins. If you find one, pick it up. And drop us a line."

The campaign also taught them a few interesting lessons like "People are almost twice as likely to pick up a penny in Soho than they are in Williamsburg (we staked a few out to come up with these numbers)" and "Homeless people aren't nearly as interested in pennies as one might think. In fact, they find them borderline insulting."

It's no secret Trend Hunter loves adding -vertising to create new words pertaining to different forms of advertising, but apparently we're not the only ones. Nice!