Harley-Davidson Uses Chatroulette For Free Advertising

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Here in my hometown (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) there is a little motorcycle company called Harley-Davidson. I don’t care for their overpriced, ancient motorcycles, but many do and now the company is getting some free advertising on the online video chat site, Chatroulette.

For the 1% of you who have missed the whole Chatroulette story, it’s a video chat site where you are randomly paired with a stranger. The site has gotten a lot of mass media attention, and has it’s far share of strange users on it. But I haven’t heard of anybody using it for advertising, until now.

Harley’s German ad firm took an iSight camera and pointed it at a cardboard sign reading “Sorry, I’m on the road” along with the Harley-Davidson logo. They then connected it to Chatroulette and (I assume) let it run 24/7, giving all the random strangers some free Harley exposure.

The video posted by the agency shows lots of people smiling and reacting positively to the ad. Of course, one wonders how many people got pissed and just clicked on to the next man exposing himself friendly random stranger.

The video doesn’t say how long they had the ad up for, but they did say that 170,000 impressions were made via their little Chatroulette experiment. It’ll be interesting to see Chatroulette does anything to stop it from becoming full of advertising. They’ve been pretty laissez faire on the whole rules thing, with their official ‘terms of service’ being (16 and older, no nudity).