For many companies, especially startup companies, having the universe help you in anyway to move closer towards your objectives can be more than welcome but few and far between occurring.
Funding is especially difficult in the early stages as you look to build a company from the ground up. You need to get your company name out there to get investment and traction, but you need money to get that recognition, with digital marketing and advertising costs adding up very quickly.
So when an opportunity presents itself to advertise your company, completely free, on a billboard in none other than Times Square, New York you can imagine that our early stage start up was ecstatic.
So just some context on how we got there. We designed our own business cards with Vistaprint a few weeks back ready for meeting and events over the coming months. They turned out pretty nice but we do have a biased opinion!
Anyway, a few days later, Vistaprint contacted us to ask our permission to use the cards on some of their marketing channels. Of course we replied, we were chuffed that they would ask this and thought it would be pretty cool if they were on their website, many people would see it and it could get some traffic to our website. Little did we know what they had planned.
Two days later we received another message from Vistaprint, which went like this, “Thanks, @teemieapp! We have exciting news – we’re using our billboard in Times Square in New York to spotlight small business owners this month, and your photo has been selected to be featured.”
For a minute or two admittedly we did think this was a prank. I mean, a Times Square billboard is probably one of if not the most expensive advertising spaces in the world! So after some overly suspicious investigation, the Vistaprint team that contacted us was very real and yes, we would be going up there on the billboard.
Up to 390,000 pedestrians walk past this billboard everyday so in terms of the value to our company, let’s just say that we would probably not have the resources right now to afford the cost per impression of this billboard. That does not even calculate the amount of cars that pass through there and even more importantly, the visual of the spot and ability to use that visual on our own website and social media channels. Just invaluable to a start up company.
As a sidenote, being based in Ireland it was difficult to get a good photo of the billboard. We had a live webcam but that had horrible resolution. We needed to get resourceful and began asking friends and family if they knew anybody in New York on the day. We even ended up going onto Instagram, looking at people who had tagged #TimesSquare the most recently and actually messaged a few to see if they would help us out! Could be interpreted as a creepy message but we gave it a shot!
Luckily for us, a friend works for a US company with a base in Ireland called Kemp Technologies and the stars aligned for us as their main office is around the corner from Times Square! So all credit and thanks goes to them for getting us a couple of good images of our 15 mins!
One of our objectives from the very beginning with this company was to set-up in New York, it is the ideal location for Teemie and we were there 6 months ago scouting at potential places where Teemie US would be based. So for this to happen out of nowhere, in our favourite place is, as we interpret it, destiny telling us to get there as soon as possible!