Srcasm

The idea of advertising is not a new one.  Google has mastered the online world, Clear Channel seems to own most of the real-life TV, radio and billboard advertising.  Why couldn’t we start to allow people to advertise with their own vehicles? 

Take a travelling sales guy (or girl) for instance.  They travel over 150 miles per day down the highway, stuck in traffic, stopped at red lights and parked in open lots.  Now take a product like LTLprints.  They have something that seems to be fairly waterproof, durable to the sun and it doesn’t harm almost anything.  What if we put these two together to form the greatest, movable advertising system ever.  Inexpensive to produce (under $150), could be as small or as large as necessary and it won’t damage the vehicle.

Could you imagine a swarm of PostIt, AOL, Starbucks or Whole Foods cars driving around the highway?  It would be advertising genius and could possibly make four different parties money.  The advertiser gets customers, the company that designs the advertising gets paid, the company that places the ads gets a service fee and the car owner gets a cut of the placement.

One large issue is see is the control of the advertisements that go on YOUR vehicle.  This could be solved with a simple two-way agreement system.  Half.com uses it for selling your books.  Someone opts to purchase the book (or space in this case) and the seller gets the chance to both name their price AND to take the offer or not.

Just a thought, keep it in mind if you’re looking to make big money.  And if you don’t mind, send a slice of it my way.

I had a very interesting discussion with a great friend, Alex, where he pretty much called me a pain in the arse.  Not in so many words mind you but that’s what he was saying.  The reason, besides my obvious pain in the arse nature, was that I was asking too many questions and not doing enough.  His exact quote at 11:34a was:

…instead of talk about things, i do them and lead by example instead. you just havent been paying attention

He’s right.  I’ve been watching and loving what everyone does without actually paying attention.  It’s easy to gloss over the smaller points of someone’s mindset, ideas and goals and it’s even easier to simple ignore what they have to say.   They can paint the walls with their thoughts and ideas but at the end of the day, it may just be colors on a wall.

Why am I writing any of this?  I wanted to share with you another small tidbit that Alex shared with me.  Information is very important.  Research, educating yourself and learning the ins and outs of your business or idea is of the utmost but there is a difference  between being cautious (reading up on everything before you take the leap) and being diligent is that:

…The nice thing about diligence is you can do it along the way.

So I ask you this simple question.  Why?  Why haven’t you attempted your crazy idea?  Why haven’t you taken a leap of faith and jumped into the entrepeneur world?  Why haven’t you switched jobs?  Or bought that new house?  Why?  I know I am.  Next week, I plan on launching something new that might be strange, new, scary and awesome but it’ll be launched (with the help of many friends).  I’m taking that leap.

I seem to come up with ideas left and right and I think it would only be fair to put them out there for the community to mull over and possibly implement. I am opening these up to anything you would like to do with them. You owe me nothing (although if you’d like me involved I’d be more than happy to help) if you use them and I wish you the best of luck — in fact, if you roll it out, I’ll probably review and write about them on one of the many blogs I currently write for. So please, this new category on my blog will be for simply putting the information out there and starting a conversation.

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Text 2 Drink - You want that drink and you want it now.
So, during a late night drinking trip at National Mechanics with Bart (and later had Alex’s input as well), I came up with this interesting concept. There have been similar tries with regards to SMS based advertising and coupons but this takes a little bit different approach.

The idea is that bars would get a system installed. This would be a small computer (think Eee PC) and a receipt printer. When someone sits down at a table, the waiter (or waitress) would take a credit card to open a tab, would then click a button on the computer and it would print a slip with instructions and a generated serial number. The table would get this slip and the waiter would be off to the next table.

Whenever a drink was needed by the table, anyone there could simply send a text message to 37465 (DRINK) with their special ID and the type of drink they desire. This information would pop up on the special computer behind the bar, the bartender would see it, make the drink, set it up for the waiter with information about which table it goes to. This not only saves time but also allows the waiter to reduce the number of trips to each table and allows the drinker to get their next beverage that much faster.

On top of this idea could be built in a sponsorship mode. Instead of drinkers being able to order any drink, they send a text to 37465 with their special ID only and the “drink of the night” is brought to them. Think of Coors, Bud, Philadelphia Brewing Company or any others sponsoring their beer of the night. The bar gets a discount on beers and the drinkers get the savings passed on.

This service could be setup for trial with simply an iPhone at the bar and system setup with TextMarks and a simply API being built. So go ahead, what do you think? Doable or not? If so, do it.