I keep meaning to blog all the promotions I turn down so I look cool and counterculture-ish. The reality is that I only turn them down because what they offer is so depressingly small (which is probably insultingly in line with what I’m worth). Here’s a snippet from one I received today:
Hi Brad,
My name is [...] and I’m working at [...], a marketing firm based in Baltimore, Maryland. I wanted to reach out to you to see if you’d be willing to help us with a project with Twix. There are only 2 more weeks in which we have to gain several thousand more entrants into a Twix sweepstakes, with prizes totaling an amount of $4800. We were wondering if you’d be able to post a banner up on your website that would link to [...]. In return for you, we have tons of Twix bars to give away and we even have a couple MLB baseball tickets to give away in the Tampa Bay, Houston and Atlanta areas.
It’s official Brad policy to not be against selling out. I certainly have lines I won’t cross, but for the most part I support the idea of making money. But to slap some ads on my site for some free Twix bars is scraping the bottom of the barrel, even for me. Baseball tickets in another country don’t interest me much either unless they come with plane tickets.
But then I thought: “Whoah, he said tons of Twix bars”. What could I do with a stupid amount of Twix bars? Why, I could have the most chocolatey live show ever! Just think how they’d pile into the club if the sign said “Brad Sucks Live Tonight + FREE ALL YOU CAN EAT TWIX BARS”.
So I wrote back: “How many free Twix bars are we talking about here?” No reply so far. I hope that’s not the last time in my life I get to ask that question.
