Every so often Rob Rotten and a friend or two spend the night pasting posters of Rachel Rotten on to the walls of construction sites and buildings in the Bay Area, hoping that a passerby might enjoy the site of a 16 ft. Rachel Rotten enough to purchase a membership to RachelRotten.com, the Website being promoted.
“It’s a great way to let people know what you are doing and at the same time, it’s just covering up ads for Imacs or something. It makes walking down the streets more interesting,” Rob Rotten told AVN.com. “And a 16 ft. Rachel Rotten is a pretty impressive site.”
Rotten is talking about sniping, also known as wheat pasting - hijacking billboards, walls, and traffic poles by pasting up his own poster.
Rotten picked up the promotional technique by being part of the punk scene and seeing how people promoted their music, but perfected it working with culture jammers like Zoltron, a Bay Area graphic artist who most recently designed a “Bush is Evil” poster campaign.
Rotten makes posters in various sizes ranging from a few feet tall to the aforementioned 16 feet. Not all of the posters are of Rachel Rotten; there a some Rob Rotten posters and some promoting The Rottens.com
Rotten, who pastes hundreds of posters every month, cautions that a person can be sent a hefty fine by the city if they can track the poster back to the person that pasted it up – something that is easy for the city to do when the poster promotes a Website.
“So we pick are places carefully. You can’t be stupid about it, but that still leaves plenty of places to wheat paste,” Rotten said.
The posters usually only stay on the walls for a week or two before they get torn down, but memberships to RachelRotten.com always go up after a campaign, so Rob doesn’t have a problem going back out and wheat pasting again.
Posters aren’t the only grass roots marketing technique Rotten uses; he also passes out lighters, stickers, and T-shirts to promote the Website.
“Wheat pasting is by far the most effective thing we do, though the lighters are right up next to it.” Rotten said. “I pass out the lighters and those people see it, then they lose the lighter and someone else has seen the lighter, and it keeps going on like that. You know you’ve done it right when it gets passed back to you.”
“The T-shirts are great because then I’ve got a walking billboard and no telling how many people will see them,” Rotten added.
Rob and Rachel Rotten make their own posters, stickers, and T-shirts in true DIY fashion. The posters, stickers, and T-shirts are also sold on Rachel Rotten.com – but if you live in the Bay Area, you might be able to score a freebee at a local punk bar.
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| Rachel and Rob Rotten in front of a wall that they have just wheat pasted (Rob likes to wear a black mask while sniping - it's an inside joke). |
