Media Resources

“Dakar Rally” Hopefuls Raise Funds with Pixel Advertising

Vienna (Austria), January 3, 2007

Two students are using the teaser pixel on you-cant-resist.com to cleverly promote their own plan. Their ingenious idea is to sell the sponsor-ad space on their SUV pixel by pixel to enable small sponsors to take part in the Dakar Rally, generally considered to be the world’s most famous desert rally.

The Dakar Rally (previously called the Paris-Dakar Rally) is probably the world’s most famous desert rally. Which rally-sport fan has not dreamed of becoming a part of this off-road motor sport race, which has been held annually since 1979 and takes place mainly on the African continent. The Austrian student Daniel Botz and his buddy Daniel Puschina are such rally-sport fans. And they have come up with a groundbreaking idea of how to turn their dream of driving in this rally into reality.

Botz and Puschina sell online ad space made up of tilets on a virtual Dakar Rally SUV. On the website www.dreamingofdakar.com sponsors can support the team by purchasing online ad-space “tilets”. 1 tilet equals a 24x24 pixel square and costs €75 (approximately $98). The proceeds will be used to purchase the (real) SUV and finance the team’s participation in the rally.

The clever part is that the tilets purchased online will not only be shown online, but will also be displayed on the real Dakar Rally SUV. A company specializing in vehicle coatings will transfer the online images 1:1 to the car. This will let even the smallest sponsors become a part of the long-distance desert run, which before now has only been accessible to bigger sponsors

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You will notice a certain creativity and ingenuity that lies in Botz and Puschina. By continuously developing new ideas and an extraordinary feat of guerilla marketing, the students have generated increasing interest in their idea. One of these ideas has been advertising their project on www.you-cant-resist.com, another unique pixel site, since 2007. You-cant-resist.com offers only a single pixel. But the person who wins it in one of the weekly auctions can redirect website traffic to his or her own project. This way, the rally team draws valuable attention to their ambitious plan by utilizing another pixel website. Who would ever have thought that small pixels would make it so big.

Images

Simulation of the Dakar Rally SUV with tilets, JPG image, 2160 x 1188

Screenshot of the pixel homepage, TIFF image, 828 x 665

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