Why We Did Giveusbacknewyork.com

A couple of years ago (we were ECD’s at JWT Amsterdam at the time) we had a little free time and created a website called giveusbacknewyork.com.

The basic idea was that New York was New Amsterdam once and there for Dutch property and we created a website and fake action group claiming it back.

We made a very simple action-group like website and put one single video on YouTube.

We also wrote some emails to bloggers, and then waited what would happen.

A lot happened.

In only 2 weeks we had over 1 million unique visitors who spent between 5-10 minutes on giveusbacknewyork.com

When the number of visitors decreased we made new YouTube videos, wrote more emails to more blogs and thought of new initiatives.

Like sending T-shirts to people in New York, who we didn’t know but who did have a Dutch surname, and getting some friends of ours in New York to plant tulips in Central Park.

Each time we initiated some new thing the number of visitors rose.

And when we tried something that didn’t work, we quickly created something else.

Eventually things got so big that the off line media started to take notice.

We were interviewed by New York newspaper and made the 8 o clock Dutch national TV news (the item lasted 8 minutes, with one million people watching).

That’s when the questions came. And the questions weren’t even directed at us, it was people asking other people questions.

Well, when we say people, we have to be more precise.

It was advertising people asking other advertising people questions.

And when people who work in advertising ask questions, they usually think they already know the answer.

The question was: “Why did they (two advertising guys) create giveusbacknewyork.com?”

And the only answer they could come up with was: they want PR for the agency and themselves.

Even Dutch advertising magazines thought this was our reason.

It wasn’t.

Our reason was that we wanted to find out what it takes to create a successful on line campaign.

And because clients were not asking us to do it, we decided to create something our selves.

We wanted to learn how to do exciting things on the internet and the only way to learn that (sorry gurus) is to actually start doing things yourself.

We wanted to learn and we did.

We learned how to promote a website using YouTube.

We learned how to promote our YouTube videos using the website.

We learned how to sell stuff by opening a web shop.

We learned how printing 200 T shirts and stickers and sending them to people can get you on national TV and can get complete strangers to put stickers all over New York .

We learned how to approach bloggers.

And how not to approach bloggers.

We learned all these things and had a lot of fun, but most of our colleagues in the advertising business thought we did it only to make a name for ourselves.

They just couldn’t think of another reason.

Which to us seems pretty weird since we are all in the thinking business.