Viral Marketing High Jinks

'George sporting a nice fro.'

I've had a lot of fun with my dedication site "HappyAfro.com". I was even interviewed by Chicago public radio and interviewed as if I was Bob Ross which was a lot of fun and pretty hilarious too.

Well, 90% of the time I use my debit card to buy stuff and rarely have cash on hand. But when I do I like to doodle afro's on the presidents and write "HappyAfro.com" on the bill itself. It's a fun creative use of commerce and capitalism in pursuit of art.


'AJ goes urban funk.'

Who knows how far these bills will travel through circulation nationwide and maybe even over seas? I figure it's a simple and harmless viral marketing tactic that will give people a few laughs and that is why I decided to post about it here.


'Embedded code within US currency design.'

So I took these bills out of my wallet that I had drawn on and scanned them in to create the images you see in this post and when I opened them up in Adobe Photoshop a window instantly popped up and showed me this message. Yikes! Apparently our money has encoded counterfeit technology literally embedded into the designs that even when scanned is recognized by something Adobe has integrated into Photoshop CS3. It may have been there in previous versions but I don't know since I never scan in money?

I know there are companies that are developing this technology and I know a few artists who are beta testers and get monthly reports on who is using their images without permission online or in print. One company that is doing this in Canada has a great site you can view here.

Anyway I didn't try to print anything out of Photoshop, I was afraid if I did that some message would be sent to the secret service covertly and I'd have the FBI knocking on my studio door in a few hours and I don't think they'd find presidential fro's very funny. I have to admit the technology is pretty stinking impressive though.