Company Convinces Man To Tatoo His Head: Walking Billboards
from the welcome-to-the-past dept
Quick! Check the calendars. Is it 1999 again? Remember all the silly publicity stunts companies did back then? Remember how you could win money if you changed your name (or the name of your town) to that of a dot com? Then, there were those great Outpost.com commercials where they showed babies with "Outpost.com" tattoos on their forheads. It appears that hosting company CI Host has stolen that idea from Outpost.com (can Outpost.com - now owned by Fry's - sue?) and are paying some sucker to tattoo their logo on the back of his head for the next five years. He needs to leave it visible, and answer questions of anyone who asks him about it. I could only find the press release about it, so it's a bit biased. Oddly, the press release claims that there's been a ton of press coverage about this story, but I haven't seen any yet. The company claims that this stunt alone has raised traffic 12% and has been directly responsible for 23 new customers. I'm not sure I'd believe those stats. Update: As someone pointed out in a comment below, this paid-tattoo-advertising is becoming something of a trend.
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C I Host
I don't think many people who know much about this company would believe the stats either. http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ banned the name "C I Host" (and anything that remotely resembles it) from their forums due to the number of complaints posted to the board by disgruntled customers.
Complaints ranged from credit cards being billed after cancellations, repeatedly, to C I Host taking customers' money and then not even providing them with the service they paid for (and refunds were non-existent).
They also claimed to have something like 6 datacenters in the U.S. alone, with more all over the world (it was proved to be a false claim). WebHostingTalk.Com would still be full of posts from customers who signed up for a hosting plan that advertised free airplane tickets with a 12 month contract and then received nothing had it not been for a WHT admin banning the name.
I don't know of any other forums with posts about C I Host (I think a lot of them have followed WHT's lead) but go through C I Host's press releases and I'm sure you'll find a lot of "embellishments."
Josh
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Human Billboards
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Re: C I Host
-Ward
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