We have seen people do it with T-shirts, songs, viral
marketing campaigns and endless rounds of sandwich-boards. Now, 24-year-old
media production graduate Adam Pacitti is the toast of the internet – and all
over the news – after he rented a large poster site in London to advertise
himself for work. "I spent my last £500 on this billboard," the
billboard says. "Please give me a job."
You have to admire Pacitti's chutzpah, but do stunts like
this work? Does he have a job yet? "I don't," he says. "But a
lot of companies are expressing interest." How many? "At least 50.
They're saying they like what I've done. They like my initiative. They all just
want to meet up and see where they can take things … There's a couple of
production companies who are talking about roles I'd be really interested
in."
He has certainly gone about this like a pro, working in an
amusement arcade all summer to save the money, then spending two months
preparing the campaign. In the ad itself, he also had the sense to trim the
truth a little bit. "The billboard was actually £530 plus VAT," he
admits, "but that didn't sound very catchy." The snootily inclined
might point out that Pacitti has done this sort of thing before, having scored
another viral hit in 2008 with his quest to find The Girl of my Dreams. In the
eyes of a media boss, however, that surely makes him more impressive.
Indeed the billboard tactic has a record of success. Last
May, Bennett Olson got a job in marketing after buying $300 worth of ad space
on a revolving site in Minneapolis. The summer before, it was Féilim Mac An
Iomaire, who got a job with Paddy Power after he rented a site in Dublin. In
2010, an unemployed marketing executive called Pasha Stocking spent $2,000 on a
billboard in Bridgeport Connecticut, imploring passersby to "Hire
me!" In the event, no one needed to, because she ended up launching her
own PR agency.
More subtly, in the summer of 2010, Alec Brownstein found
work as an advertising copywriter using a scheme he called the Google Job
Experiment. For $6, Brownstein bought online advertising that would show a
message from him whenever one of New York's leading creative directors entered
their own name into Google. Around the same time, a young actor, Elyse
Porterfield, staged a hugely successful hoax, pretending to resign from her job
in a blaze of glory, and in the process drummed up a number of real ones.
People using old-fashioned sandwich boards to find jobs
outside media or marketing, however, have a more mixed record. Among recent
examples, Jason Fruen, David Rowe, Giles Metcalfe and James Elgeti all did find
work. Yet there is no sign of any good news about Michael Adlington, Robin
Norton or Debi Wendes, which points to a depressing trend. Everybody in the
first group was in their 20s or 30s; everybody in the second was in their 40s
or 50s.
The rules, then, seem simple. If you're going to try a trick
like this, be young, be inventive, aim for a job that involves
attention-seeking – and if it works, be ready. "I've never been so
stressed in my life," Pacitti says. "So many people are contacting
me, and I can't get back quick enough!"
Source: 7 January 2013, The Guardian by Leo Benedictus
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