Y ou find yourself looking at the website in disbelief. These two guys, Chris and Luke, are asking you to pay for their college education. Not for charity, but because it’s better for you. They try to entice you with a slide show that features them striking whimsical poses and sporting plain white shirts with phrases like “Your Ad Here” and “Rent This Space” superimposed on the front.
And it worked.
Chris Barrett and Luke McCabe, sophomores at Pepperdine University and the University of Southern California, became ‘the world’s first corporately-sponsored college students,” by FirstUSA, who entirely funded their freshman year.
They’re now starting a new website designed for teens and young adults to score free sample products, and they’ve also created a website for a leukemia charity that earned them an invite to this year’s Teen Choice Awards.
It’s hard to believe these fledgling entrepreneurs were simply high school students in Haddonfield, N.J. just a few years ago. Now, they’re mingling with celebrities backstage at the Teen Music Awards and going to college for free.
How did they do it?
The answer, they revealed in a recent interview near Haddonfield, is simple: Tiger Woods.
The two had been visiting colleges in California the summer before their senior year of high school. They were lamenting the high costs of college when inspiration struck.
“We were back at our hotel watching Tiger Woods in a Nike hat,” McCabe recalled.
“Simultaneously, we said, ‘Why not us?” Barrett interrupted. “We sort of laughed it off a little bit then realized that it was a good idea.”
They could market themselves as walking billboards on a college campus, wearing a company’s logos “like NASCAR drivers,” Barrett explained. If they marketed themselves well, there had to be a company somewhere willing to pay for their services. To the college-bound duo, it was worth a shot.
They shared their idea with Karen Ammond, a publicist who they had been interning for that summer. She liked the idea, told them to tweak it and try it out.
The pair set to work, creating a promotional slide show and launching www.chrisandluke.com. Ammond filed a press release with a media alert service to which hundreds of radio shows subscribe. Barrett and McCabe began to assemble media kits and send them to different news outlets.
As it turns out, both already had some marketing experience. Barrett wrote a booklet about getting into concerts for free, sold enough copies online to buy a blue BMW convertible, and McCabe had fronted and marketed a band for seven years, though “we were only serious for a couple,” he said.
Nevertheless, the new venture was a big undertaking.
“We didn’t have the big celebrity background of a Tiger Woods-type character,” McCabe said. “We wanted to create that from scratch.”
Much to their surprise, they said, the website found immediate success. Yahoo.com listed the site within three days (it was at one point named “Yahoo! Site of the Day” twice in the same week) and Barrett estimates he and McCabe received fifteen requests for interviews “within the first day.’ Local media outlets picked up on their story, and they started appearing in local papers and on news broadcasts.
As the school year started, they routinely did a scattering of radio interviews before school, often slipping away from classes to call a station somewhere, “behind the principal’s back,” McCabe said.
Scott Fleming, Chris and Luke’s high school marketing teacher, praised the young businessmen and their efforts.
“You find them everywhere. You were bombarded by [the website],” Fleming said. “It appeared in so many magazines, it was televised. They made themselves known.” And, according to Fleming, that’s what made the campaign work.
The exposure brought with it offers from companies that were interested in sponsoring them. However, some of the offers they received were more reasonable than others.
“[Hotjobs.com] wanted us to wear their shirts for 24 hours a day, six days a week,” McCabe said. “We’d get an hour-break here or there, but we didn’t think that would work too well.”
Instead of becoming mere corporate puppets, Barrett and McCabe began to change their vision for the project. They started to see themselves less as walking billboards and more as spokesmen who could carry a message – one they would work with the company to craft. They had a list of 15 companies they wanted to contact and proposed this active approach in their solicitations, looking for the perfect fit.
‘It was a lighthearted website,” Barrett said, ‘but people understood that we were serious about what we were doing. [The message] wasn’t, ‘We’ll wear your clothes; give us $40,000.’ It was, ‘We’ll work with you to do what you want. We want to be part of your media campaign.”
Eventually, the pair’s search narrowed to two companies, AT’T and FirstUSA Bank. They picked FirstUSA Bank because they liked its message (the bank wanted them to help launch a fiscal responsibility for college students campaign) and because its representatives showed more enthusiasm.
The deal was announced on the Today Show the morning of Barrett and McCabe’s high school graduation. They spent that summer working on FirstUSA’s campaign and doing more interviews.
“Taking two young, good-natured kids like Chris and Luke, and making them spokespersons for themselves certainly is indicative of what marketers are looking for right now,’ Fleming said.
Once they started college, they were basically free to devote themselves to their studies.
FirstUSA understood that “the reason we did this was for school,” Barrett said.
But the hectic schedule of college hasn’t kept the two from pursuing side projects, such as www.teens4acure.com, a website they designed to help the National Children’s Leukemia Foundation build recovery centers for children who have received bone marrow transplants. That charity led to the Teen Choice Awards invite, where Barrett and Ammond had several celebrities sign a T-Shirt to auction off for the cause.
They’re also starting www.lootz.com, a site they hope will turn into an online community of over 100,000 young people that companies can draw on as product testers, a pre-selected sample group of a coveted demographic. And they’re re-launching chrisandluke.com to market their services to new companies.
For that, they plan to shoot a video after the interview. They want to film themselves driving somewhere in Chris’ black Land Rover.
“We’re going to stop about this close to you,” Luke tells the camera man, holding his hands no more than three inches apart, joking at first, then realizing it’s sort of a good idea.
Racing down the road towards the man with the camera, they veer away at the last possible second. They had either decided the shot was too risky or that the drive-by would look better.
There is a method to their madness, and when they discuss how the shots will come together in the final product, they’re completely serious. They have a vision and they’re driven to bring it to life – even if they have to have a good time doing it.