INTERACTIVE ADVERTISING

In 1996 Dan Zen coined the phrase "Interactive Advertising". He did a search on Web Crawler, the Google of the time and the phrase did not exist. He started a site called Admusements where prototypes of interactive advertising can be found. The idea was to let people play with brands, logos, wears, etc. In doing so they have fun and spend time with the brand.

Dan Zen watched Interactive Agencies come and go and the dawn of "advergaming" come and morph into "gamification" - he still likes his Admusements.

Ad Inventor was proposed to take Dan Zen features and sell them to other companies so that they could brand the creations. Zen had a series of banner add inventions - banners being the king of advertising at the time. These were Banner Chat, Banner Gift, Roll-through Banners, etc. Zen always wanted to make money directly from the public rather than selling out to advertising and in the end, did not go forward with Ad Inventor. The Ad Inventor site was scrapped and only exists today as a support for GOGO - Zen's Video Ad system.

Agency Zen currently represents Dan Zen and on occassion he has tried to sell various templated sites. For example, Austin Powers Golden Ball and Spy Kids Spy-mail.

VIRAL MARKETING

In the early 2000's Dan Zen compiled some marketing thoughts from the past half dozen years in a site called Hypno. This summarized a series of viral marketing campaigns. There was also a mini-site to try and promote the usage of Viral Campaigns. This was to attract advertisers to the Blimp Race games where friends would invite friends to come be in their blimp, with thousands of people playing and reaching places like Silicon Valley, India and Hawaii. 7,000 people played Shrink Ray, a follow up viral marketing game. You can read all about it on the summary site. Unlike most Dan Zen games, these games had a start and an end.

Dan Zen also used invite techniques on every Dan Zen feature. There was an invite stone at the top of the page. He gave away free passes to Utopia for inviting friends and grew the Utopia Mystery line to 4,000 people. Spirogram and Spy-mail also worked to encourage people to come to Dan Zen to see messages. The Dan Zen feature, Telepathy, was one of the first news letters with a subscription of 25,000 fans who would be Receive Messages in their minds when something new was happening at Dan Zen.

GUERILLA MARKETING

In addition to digital marketing techniques, Dan Zen also used unique physical marketing campaigns. In 1996, he distributed Dan Zen Stones primarily around the Hamilton and Toronto areas although some made it to Vancouver, Hawaii, Italy, etc. Zen stamped river and lake stones with www.danzen.com. This was one of the earliest examples of URL's being used on physical items. He followed up with advertisements, "when you see a stone, think Dan Zen" in Shift Magazine, an early technology magazine similar to Wired.

Dan Zen put stickers the following were for mirrors, revolving doors and elevators:

He spray painted PLAY DAN ZEN on sidewalks by schools. Zen's primary mode of marketing was poster - he posted approximately 20 campaigns through the first ten years of Dan Zen ending with the 10 Years of Creation poster in 2005.

Dan Zen had print artist, Mark Byk make a silkscreen of an Opartica poster printed on large card. These were intended for clothing stores, record stores, etc. in hopes that they would sponsor Opartica and put their logos in the center to be shown at raves of the time.

For Utopia, Dan Zen put wooden flowers around the town that held Utopia flyers. For Spy-mail, the poster was a half size tall vertical poster of the various spies peaking out - these were folded along the edge and stapled to polls and taped to walls to peak out at the public.

Dan Zen took away all games and while he redisigned his site, he put up the Itching Campaign where he took pictures of his friends itching to play Dan Zen - a pun on the Iching.

For V-bod - Dan Zen's virtual board of director software, he use cut out cards with a mirror behind to imply that this product would allow you to really see yourself. He also tried selling cards for ZenPass in variety stores. For $5 you would get a pass to play mysteries online or any other content that Zen would provide or partner with. An excellent idea considering consumers will more readily pay for physical items. Of course, the ironic thing is, the content is free online anyway if you can find it - so in other words, the customer is paying for showing them the link. But... because people just do not have time to look at things online, this makes the perfect gift. Oh... so and so likes mysteries... etc.

Recently, Dan Zen - as Hollander Maui, launched a Sticker Campaign of speech bubbles saying: "They say, he is Hollander Maui" to promote buzz for an upcoming art show as Focuso Photographer Hollander Maui. The campaign was very successful in its meta sense of placing the stickers on hundreds of faces already pasted over town on posters and advertisements. Zen even placed a sticker on another sticker.

Dan Zen's business card features an op art pattern (created with Opartica) on the back. If you lightly crimp the card, it Spins on almost any surface, hypnotizing the recipient to come to Dan Zen. The card has been extremely successful with 1/5 people saying it is the best business card they have ever seen - at which point Zen comments that it is a pleasure card as opposed to a business card.

SHAREWARE

All through-out, Dan Zen has tried to support his time providing people with millions of hours of entertainment by getting money from the end user. This has been extremely hard to do especially with community games where you need people to play. He has tried a number of shareware strategies. His earliest was to donate to see the World's Tallest Hat.

He followed this up with an elaborate scheme during the Pagoda of Games interface. Here, he let people sign-up or sneak in. The majority snuck in. Then at the bottom of the thousands of Dan Zen pages, there was a line-up showing the number of people waiting to get in to the pagoda - this actually tallied to the number of people who snuck in and there was a plea: "if you donate, you will let all these people in to the Pagoda". This concept FREUD of helping others as well increased donations by ten times the donations for the Tallest Hat.

MEMES

Dan Zen was an early adopter of memes having found out about them during the creation the award winning Understanding McLuhan CD Rom in 1996. Zen built a sliding site for the promotion of the McLuhan disc. All the content was loaded at once on a big grid spaced with a cool background and when you clicked it would move to the appropriate content on the grid.

He treated Stones as a meme - and to this day, he hopes when people see a stone they think Dan Zen.

Moving to more current times, Dan Zen has attempted a number of times to "go viral" with features such as Kitty Tartan, Things Not To Do with an iPhone, Ninja Kitty, etc., etc.

MOBILE MEDIATED CAMPAIGNS

Touchy is the mobile game where you try to touch a target on the other player's mobile device without letting your target get touched. The game causes a spectacle when played in public so by its nature leads to viral marketing - people ask "what are they playing?" and crowds gather around. Touchy, got on CBC's Dragons' Den where the dragons played Touchy and seemed to have a heck of a lot of fun. Sales of Touchy go up 10 times every time the episode is aired. Zen created Touchy TV to capture the tranformative experience with a hosted play-by-play. He also created Touchy Tokens to give out as gifts.

Dan Zen's mobile app called Hangy provide a way for Zen to promote various apps on his wearable computer made from a Tablet and String. He wore this at Supercrawl and was seen by thousands of people and met hundreds. He has promoted hangy at mobile conferences, user groups, night clubs and parties - a walking billboard.

Tilty is the follow-up game to Touchy, where you try to keep your device level while physically jostling the other players. Dan Zen handed out Tilty cards and a dollar coin to people to market the game at "SuperCrawl", a large street festival. He challenged them that if they could knock the big orange ball of his head before he knocked the coin off their card, they could keep the coin. He played 250 times over the course of the last supercrawl and gave out 500 cards.

Dan Zen gives demos at the Hamilton Democamp for all his apps. His latest is Droner where he had the audience control him on stage. A dozen or so downloaded the app and made Zen boogie, tickle, jiggle, breath heavily into the mic and generally climb around to the delight of the audience.

Conclusion

This tour shows some of the zany and serious promotions that Dan Zen has architected for spreading the Dan Zen word - in a word - creativity. Creativity not just by him but also by others in the environments and with the tools that he has made. His latest effort is to encourage creativity is the Dan Zen Creativity Framework and associated presentations, workshops, etc. If you are interested, please contact door @ danzen. com.