Unexpected effect from unexpected advertising.

Advertising is the engine of commerce. This is what the classics say, they have not yet become classics, everyone already knows about it. The issue of advertising itself is great, and there are already special departments in special institutes that study advertising, analyzing its effect. I know very little about advertising, but it affects my life very much. I am the owner of an online store.

As the owner of an online store, I devote almost all my free time to advertising. I have no education in this area, I have very little practice, but in any case I have to deal with advertising. Without advertising on the forums, my store would not have attracted the share of my customers. Without the Google Shopping service, no one would have guessed that my store has quality tents cheaper than others.

But advertising takes time, investment. The Google Adwords service once got two thousand rubles out of my pocket in two days. And for this reason, I curtailed the attempts to make paid advertising for myself - it is not the level I have to “bash” thirty thousand a month for the promotion and services of SEO specialists. Yes, and CEO, as such, in some places does not seem to me an honest exercise.
')
Suddenly, at the Empty Hills festival, someone began to look for Valera ...


Initially, the story was not the most pleasant. I promised my friends to deliver several tents to the Empty Hills festival. Yes, and took with him a dozen more - for sale. But I could not leave Moscow.

My favorite car was broken. And the insurance pulled as much as she could. And I reached the point that I urgently bought an old-aged Volkswagen, so that there was at least something to deliver the goods. It was on this Volkswagen that I decided to take a desperate step - go to the festival. I did not take into account the fact that the bearings of the rear wheels have deteriorated so much that they collapsed literally twenty kilometers away.

All evening I fiddled with the car, so that by morning she was again capable of deliveries. And by the morning I received a strange SMS: “Valera, where are you? Everybody is looking for you here. ” When I called my friends, I heard the discordant choir of the Valera-aa crowd live.

In the morning on the Internet, I read that the festival has turned into a flash mob. Its essence was that the crowd, gathered to listen to music and unwind, "is looking for Valera."

I published this story on my website as a curiosity, but after a couple of days I noted with interest that people began to come to me at the request "looking for Valera." I laughed and continued to pile up the forums in their direct direction - selling tourist equipment.

It was time for the “Invasion” festival, on which more than a dozen tents were also successfully installed. And suddenly ... "Valera-aa" thundered there as well.

I was surprised, scratched my head and registered on a dozen sites, where the subject of “search for Valera” was sucked. Moreover, there are sites that are entirely devoted to this topic. I registered and told my story, and on the same day the number of visitors increased dramatically. With two hundred visitors a day to six hundred. About five buyers per day admitted that they came to my site, being interested in Valera's search.

Thus, chance allowed me to gain an interesting experience in the field of advertising. I seriously thought about the possibilities that a curious situation can provide. The first attempts of domestic advertising agencies in general did not provide marketing returns from flash mobs. And who remembers now what the attempts were like? I remember only the idiotic shares of Euroset. Now it all goes under the label "It was a long time and not true." But it seems to me that the mainstream will soon return to this direction. Moreover, I personally did not spend a single ruble on the “search for Valera”.