Because we all love free money, startups should try marketing with a @HiddenCash scavenger hunt

A Los Angeles crowd goes in search of 36 plastic Angry Bird orbs stuffed with cash. Photo courtesy of Time.

@HiddenCash combines two of the things that people love most: free and money. Through that Twitter account, American entrepreneur and multimillionaire Jason Buzi posts clues to the location of money he has hidden. He then encourages his Twitter followers, which now number over 700,000, to go in search of the cash drops, effectively turning his Twitter feed into a treasure map.

Today’s drop: Same EXACT place we hid Angry Birds in the sand last month. They laid 37 Pez. Goodbye, LA! Love pic.twitter.com/mWJ1w8dlUv

— Hidden Cash (@HiddenCash) July 13, 2014

The Asian gene for game shows

Generally speaking, you don’t have to be an FBI cryptographer to figure out where the money has been planted. The winners are normal Americans:

@HiddenCash Took a risk, got out of bed and started digging..now I have gas money for the whole week! Thanks! 🙂 pic.twitter.com/YwzhBMpWNJ — Tina Aldana (@iamTinaAldana) July 13, 2014

Though Buzi’s motivations do not relate to entrepreneurship – it seems this is his own, new-age version of philanthropy, if it can be called that – an enterprising startup in Asia should import the idea as part of its marketing scheme. Why? There’s one undeniable fact that no research can dispute, nor report reclaim: Asians love game shows.

I only need to present one picture as proof:

Photo courtesy of Giant Bomb

Only true artisans of zany puzzles can be imaginative enough to find a way to insert people into Tetris and be skilled enough to pull it off, shiny silver suits and all. @HiddenCash, of course, is in a sense a game show. It has a host: Jason Buzi. It has a set: wherever Buzi chooses to hide the money. It has a pool of contestants: whoever shows up to an area willing to dive into bushes and shimmy up streetlamps in search of dollars. @HiddenCash even has the cameras – whenever a mob of people show up, smartphones in hand as they scour the area like crime scene investigators, the media is never far behind.

And that’s why an Asian startup should copy this concept: Whatever money they stash away as prizes will pale in comparison to the amount of media coverage that this will generate. In some Southeast Asian countries, you can even calculate this will be cheaper than the usual way to get coverage – bribing a reporter or blogger. You’ll get a full-on media blitz from all three layers of the defense – print, digital, and broadcast – at the fraction of what it would cost if you were to go into corrupt, evil mode, on just the effort of stuffing a few envelopes, chucking them all over a park, and describing what you just did in fewer than 140 characters. Trust me, I’m a media guy. I know what launches news vans, and on this scale @HiddenCash is a Helen of Troy in a Michael Bay movie.

The morality of growth-hacking with @HiddenCash