CHALLENGE

This January Founder and President Peter Beckman wanted to drive thousands of fans of television advertisements to his new site, AdCritic.com. His marketing budget? El zippo. Nada. Diddly squat. What's a guy to do?

CAMPAIGN

Beckman optimized the site for search engines and submitted it everywhere possible, focusing on the keywords, "Superbowl Commercials." Sure enough the day after the Superbowl, "traffic exploded." Once people found out about the site momentum grew, "We're getting lots of users because they talk about it and it's just going gangbusters." Beckman says. Viral heaven.



RESULTS

The site currently gets about 50,000 unique visitors a day who spend serious time there, viewing an average of eight to 10 commercials a visit. (That's 1.5 million visits a month.) Plus, the site's been mentioned in Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Vanity Fair, CBS and ABC World News. All without ever doing any PR whatsoever. About 20% of visitors are advertising industry professionals and Beckman says, "There has been a lot of clamor by both big and small agencies to get on the site."

NOTES: Now that AdCritic.com has more cash in the bank, can we expect to see a marketing campaign anytime soon? Nope. Beckman does plan to start sending out a site email newsletter to registered users soon; but aside from that he's plowing all cash into improving the site itself. "If visitors are happy, they will keep coming back." And bringing their friends with them.