Osama T-Shirts & The Age of Instant Marketing

From the “Damn it, why didn’t I think of that” file comes a story about Mau­rice Harary, 23, an enter­pris­ing NYU stu­dent who upon hear­ing the demise of Osama bin Laden, secured the domain osamadeadtees.com and fired up a com­merce site sell­ing t-shirts, posters and stick­ers with vary­ing lev­els of taste com­mem­o­rat­ing the kill shot heard ‘round the world.  Twenty-four hours later, Harary had sold 10,000 shirts at $12 apiece – you do the math.

What this truly illus­trates, aside from the mor­bid fash­ion sense of thou­sands of peo­ple, is that when a unique and timely oppor­tu­nity presents itself in today’s world of online ubiq­uity, the ven­er­a­ble processes of tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing strat­egy are ren­dered impotent.

Harary wasn’t the only guy to cook up a site sell­ing shirts of this nature.  He was one of the first to mar­ket with a prod­uct and — equally impor­tant — with a dynamic social net­work to spread the word.  Alacrity, cre­ativ­ity and con­nec­tiv­ity did all the heavy lifting.

We all know that if this idea was hatched in a cor­po­rate board­room the hur­dles to mar­ket would have been innu­mer­able.  From dis­cus­sions of appro­pri­ate taste, to ana­lyz­ing ful­fill­ment costs, or sourc­ing pro­duc­tion ven­dors, scal­a­bil­ity and pric­ing analy­sis and hey, while you’re at it, do a com­pet­i­tive analy­sis of other sites to see who else is doing this so we’re not just repli­cat­ing an idea… and per­haps we should check with the folks in Legal, too.

With that said, there is obvi­ously a place for analy­sis and con­sen­sus.  Most projects do require a strate­gic appli­ca­tion of expe­ri­ence, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and process, but thanks to the instan­ta­neous dis­sem­i­na­tion of news and pop cul­ture through social media, what is becom­ing more and more com­mon are instances where intu­ition, inde­pen­dence and most of all speed are the decid­ing fac­tors for suc­cess.  By the time tra­di­tional avenues of strat­egy devel­op­ment have been explored the oppor­tu­nity has likely passed.

Good ideas and exe­cu­tion of those ideas are ridicu­lously per­ish­able nowa­days and espe­cially frag­ile in the pres­ence of com­mit­tee. Some­one who was not bur­dened by that fact made a cool $120K in a day.  A les­son all of us in this busi­ness can learn from.

Paul J. Cham­ber­lain is VP of Inter­ac­tive Mar­ket­ing at BRAIN­trust Marketing

He does not own an “Obama got Osama” T-shirt.