As Mashable reports, you can use a clever Google AdWords campaign to get your dream job for $6. What’s the caveat? You have to have the luxury of time.
In the summer of 2009, advertising copywriter and director Alec Brownstein used guerrilla marketing to find a better job, by targeting five hiring managers at New York ad agencies:
Since Brownstein Googles himself “embarrassingly frequently,” he assumed that the creative directors did so as well, and thus he decided to purchase their names on Google AdWords.
“Everybody Googles themselves,” Brownstein explained. “Even if they don’t admit it. I wanted to invade that secret, egotistical moment when [the creative directors I admired] were most vulnerable.”
Because there was no competition for the names, he ran the PPC ads at $0.15 per click (if you don’t know AdWords, that’s really cheap–at the opposite end, a law firm might pay $100 for every “mesothelioma” click).
As you can see in the screenshot image at the top, Brownstein’s ads said:
Hey, [creative director's name]: Goooogling [sic] yourself is a lot of fun. Hiring me is fun, too” with a link to Brownstein’s website, alecbrownstein.com.
He ultimately got a job offer after spending just $6 on the guerrilla ad campaign. He left Publicis to join Young & Rubicam, getting promoted from Copywriter to Senior Copywriter.
Cool, right? But wait. As Tamar Weinberg pointed out in the Mashable comments, “how long did Alec wait after he placed these ads before he heard back — and then before he got the job?”
If he started his campaign in June or July 2009, we can interpolate:
Over the next couple of months, Brownstein received calls from all but one of the creative directors whose names he had purchased. And finally, at the end of the year, he received a job offer from two…
Answer? It took 4-6 months. That’s not lightning speed but pretty good for an actively passive jobseeker. So it works, if you’re not in the “I need a job tomorrow” crowd.
Thanks for the clever addition to my swipe file, Alec! What do you think he might have done to speed up the conversion process?
Credits: Screenshot from Alec Brownstein’s video tutorial at YouTube. Text quotes from Lauren Indvik’s article at Mashable.
Related Posts:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Update: Alec confirmed via Twitter: “it took 2-3 months for them to contact me and then another couple of months to get the job offer.”