Alton Online - Archive of Articles

2003 Alton Holloween Parade Promotion

Since we've lost our old alton-online.com domain and switched to notla.com, we've lost a lot of our daily visitors. We used to get right around 100 hits per day when we had alton-online.com. Now we're lucky to get a dozen hits a day. Which is to be expected with a new web site that nobody knows about yet. But my friend and I decided to do a little promoting this year by passing out flyers at this year's holloween parade. So I opened up MS Publisher and whipped up a quarter-page flyer and printed out right around 1,100 of them on multi-colored paper. Since me and Cal also run the phonelosers.org site, we devoted 2/3's of the flyer to advertising that as well. Here's a shot of the finished flyers:
click on this picture to make it full-size

I got this idea when I attended the Wood River parade and some tanning salon was passing out flyers for free tanning. So I figure I'll print up a few thousand and we'll walk along with the parade and hand them out to everyone. But my friend, who's considerably less boring than me, decided to dress up in a robe and Scream mask and go nuts on the crowd as he handed flyers to them. His practice run was at the East Alton parade where he ran about 1/4 of the parade route, screaming "Do you like paper? Would you like a paper?? Screw this candy they're throwing, take a paper instead!" and other miscellaneous things. The crowd loved it, everyone was laughing, cheering and taking papers from him.

So the next night is the BIG parade in Alton. Around 6:00pm, Cal and I pack my backpack full of cameras, flyers and costumes and head towards downtown Alton. We park a few blocks away from Broadway (the parade route) and walk towards the crowds. We ask a food vendor where the parade will start and she tells us it starts by the police station which is about a mile or 2 down the street. Argh! We're an hour early so we start hiking towards the police station.
Slightly over an hour later, we're in front of Fast Eddie's and waiting for the parade to start. When it finally starts, we put on our costumes and make our way towards the parade. We're immediately nervous about the number of cops there are patroling along with the parade. So we decide to wait for a few minutes, hoping the cop action will die down a little as the parade progresses. It doesn't. We finally decide to give up because we don't want to get arrested. Minutes later, Cal changes his mind, grabs a stack of flyers and runs at the crowd screaming "WHO WANTS SOME OF MY PAPERS?!?" to everyone as I run along the sidewalk with a video camera, taping it all.

In the end, Cal papers pretty much the entire length of the parade, getting the crowds really excited about taking the flyers. The cops didn't seem to care about Cal at all. In fact, you can see in that last picture Cal is right next to a cop and he's screaming his head off. In the video, you see Cal yell to that cop "DO YOU WANT A PA--" and then he realizes it's a cop and turns away to keep offering them to the crowd. We also managed to get The Red Spoon coffee shop to take our remaining flyers and put them on the newsrack for people to take. So much thanks goes to them!
So did it work? It's really hard to tell with something like this. The hits to notla.com are definitely up - but it's probably more because of us talking about the parade incident than from people actually taking the flyers. But the important thing is that we had a lot of fun doing it. Next year we'll be sure to do something else in the name of notla.com. Maybe we'll actually go as far as entering a float into the parade! But look for us, we'll be there again.
You can watch the video of this event by clicking here. It's called Here Comes Cal! Episode #1. We got about 40 minutes of video at the parade and managed to condense it down to just slightly over 10 minutes.