Single?

Amusing investigation of a guerilla marketing strategy:

One weekend, I trekked down to South Jersey to visit my parents in my hometown of Glassboro. The town sits about 30 minutes southeast of Philadelphia and has a population of less than 20,000. As I drove past my old high school, my deal-hunting subconscious noticed something bizarre. Stuck in the grass by the curb was a white lawn sign about a foot tall with a very simple message in black Times New Roman: “Single? www.GlassboroSingles.ORG”

It looked like something the local contractor would ask to stick in your front yard while he replaced your roof. Except… well, it was plugging a dating website. I had about a million questions, but two immediately simmered to the top:

• Glassboro is a tiny market of nominal interest to even local advertisers. Who would register a domain, let alone build a website, to target our tiny population?
• Who in their right mind advertises websites with lawn signs?

By the time I pulled into my parents’ driveway, I had convinced myself that the site was the product of some overzealous local entrepreneur. I wrote off the lawn sign as an amateurish stab at guerilla marketing. When I drove out of town the next day, the sign was gone.

Fast forward a few weeks. I was back in New York, rushing up 5th Avenue on my way to work in Midtown. As I wedged myself through the usual crowd, something stopped me in my tracks. Eight feet in the air, tied to a lamp post, was a white sign with black Times New Roman: “Single? www.FifthAvenueSingles.COM”

I promptly morphed into one of those sidewalk-obstructing idiots who stares up into the sky and infuriates the people who actually have to be somewhere. Aside from the URL, this sign was identical to the one I had seen in Glassboro. By the time I got to my work, I decided that there were four possibilities:

• This was a complete coincidence and these were the efforts of two completely separate businesses with identically unorthodox advertising methods (unlikely).
• The overzealous Glassboro entrepreneur had loaded up his car with lawn signs and decided to extend his guerilla marketing scheme to the Big Apple (less likely).
• Some NY-based business had done some marketing in the tri-state area and decided Glassboro was a ripe market (even less likely).
• There was something bigger going on. This struck me as the most likely case, but raised a question that made my head hurt: if whoever is doing this has the ability to target New York City but somehow made their way down to Glassboro, how many of the towns in between have also been hit?

Not long after, I stumbled onto another clue. I was in Central New Jersey on my way to give a guest lecture at Princeton University, which is about the geographical midpoint between New York and Glassboro. As my cab rolled through neighboring West Windsor Township, I saw a familiar-looking lawn sign wedged in the grass alongside the road: “Single? www.WindsorSingles.ORG”.

That one did it for me. At the absolute least, I was now convinced that this lawn sign business had its tentacles stretched into almost every town in the state of New Jersey. It was worth spending some time to learn more....