Posted by Erin Koch

A few weeks ago, we received an unusual package here at Gable PR World Headquarters: a sealed plastic package filled with chocolate covered grasshoppers. Of the many things we receive in the mail and via delivery each week, this really jumped out. The payoff?

This past week, The Wall Street Journal venture capital blog explained the (highly successful) stunt: a company called GotVMail was rebranding itself as Grasshopper Inc., and trying to reach entrepreneurs (many of whom were recently out of work) with their call-forwarding and phone answering services. The packaging that came along with the chocolate covered locusts included a link to a Web site and a video on YouTube.

But here’s what really made our antennae stand on end: as reported by the WSJ blog, the cost of the bags of bugs (mailed to 5,000 influencers) was $67,353! The return on the investment: 150,000 views of the video, nearly 1,000,000 people reached via Twitter, and even requests to show the video at conferences. More importantly, the phones and in-boxes at Grasshopper Inc. are buzzing (or humming as the case may be).

This is an excellent example of the exponential power of a creative idea, leveraged with good PR (Gable PR had fun in leveraging ideas for two very different clients — Proflowers and Digital Microwave; consumer or B2B, creativity works). $67,000 spent on advertising would have amounted to little more than a shrug. Yet the same amount invested in a creative PR idea yielded fantastic results and media and blog coverage that spread across the land … like a plague of locusts.

Photo by Jurvetson