Passing the buck,
with a stick-on ad
Drug chain passes out dollar bills to retail outlets
By Diego Vasquez
Feb 17, 2010
It's one of those sleepy weekday mornings when you really need some caffeine, and you're barely half awake when you hand your money to the barista taking your order at the local coffee shop.
She hands back your change, and you're about to pocket the money when you notice something odd. Someone has plastered a bright red sticker over George Washington's head. In white are the words "There are more ways to save money."
Upon closer examination, you realize it is actually two stickers, one of which peels off.
Is it the work of some wacko political group or just a bored fourth-grader with a pocketful of stickers?
It's neither. It's an alternative media campaign for CVS.
The drug chain put two-tiered stickers on thousands of $1 bills and distributed them to merchants in the Bay Area, who gave them out to customers as change.
The top sticker is a coupon for $5 off any $20 purchase at CVS. The coupon pulls off to reveal a second sticker, an ad for CVS that stays on the bill when it leaves your wallet and goes back into circulation.
"Cash is in your hand all the time. People use it on a daily basis. So that's where the idea came from," says Sasha Engel, chief financial officer and chief operating officer at GoGorilla Media, which coordinated the campaign.
"For CVS the base of the sticker stayed on the bill so it still circulates with an ad on it. So it's a double effect with the coupons."
GoGorilla targeted 60 merchants at San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf last October. It distributed 1,000 $1 bills to each store, exchanging the branded dollars for plain ones and giving each merchant a small cash reward for participating.
CVS targeted coffee shops, bars, outdoor vendors, ice cream stores and others with the bills. The stickers, which measured about 3 inches by 2 inches, were made with a special adhesive so as not to damage the bills when they were pulled off. That's important because it's against the law to deface U.S. currency.
"It's basically guerrilla marketing. It's in the gray area of the law," Engel says. "A lot of things we do are borderline. They're basically tolerated."
The campaign worked in part because it put a new spin on an idea that has been used before: stickers of one sort or another on dollar bills. GoGorilla has done dollar-sticker campaigns for HSBC and USA Network.
What was different about this one was the addition of the coupon, which actually drove people to the stores.
But the stickers also worked because they play off one of the key elements of good alternative advertising, which is getting people's attention when they least expect it. You don't expect to see an ad on the change you get at the coffee shop.
GoGorilla says it heard positive feedback from the stores that handed out the bills, and it helped CVS to track how many of the coupons were used.
"We put a bar code on so they could measure it to see how many were redeemed," Engel says. "The numbers were good."
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