How throwing money on the floor can make you rich

You see them all the time; when you’re out on the high street you get all kinds of people trying to push an A5 sized piece of paper under your nose trying to advertise something completely irrelevant to you.

You might even take one of these flyers to ‘be nice’ but inevitably these things always end up in the bin.

When I set about to re-launch my magic business I wanted to play around with every aspect of advertising material, so I started with my business cards:

I remember seeing Oceans Eleven back in the early 2000’s and this one scene stood out where Danny Ocean (played by George Clooney) is trying to put a team together (come on you must have seen this!).

Danny watches another guy called Linus (Matt Damon) pick pocketing, he get’s in close and puts a business card in his pocket, on the back is a hand written message that says “Nice pull!” and he puts the location to a pub. The other side of the business card is embossed and simply says ‘Danny Ocean’. 
Watch the scene here it’s amazing.

I fell in love with this pretentious business card, it stands for so much. It’s saying “I’m so confident you know how to find me and you know who I am”, bear in mind this film was released in 2001, predating most social networks.

I adopted this business card in early April this year with the expectation that people would ‘get it’ and with how easy it is to find people in today’s world, but..they didn’t. I have since opted for a more traditional business card…because it works.

Back to the flyer or otherwise known as a pamphlet. These were first seen in the 16th century and haven’t changed much since. The difference between a pamphlet and a business card is that one is unsolicited and I’m sure even in the 16th century people crossed the street to avoid people handing pamphlets out.

I’m not saying they don’t work, my argument is that you really have to make them work for you. 

My take on this was a little different: 

What if you could leave your flyer somewhere and people would just want it. How about leaving your flyer on a table, in a lift or even just scrunching it up and leaving it on the floor and people will go out of their way to pick it up… and 9/10 they will keep it and tell other people about it.

Last year my wife found a $100 bill in a car park, at first we didn’t know if it was real, then we saw a little bit of pink Chinese writing on it and after assessing the quality we deemed it to be a worthless fake. You know what I did with it?

I kept it.

You see, even though it’s worthless I still wanted to keep it, it’s cool to have a $100 bill in your wallet and I even used the same bill to switch my cousin Mo’s $1 bill and it blew him away.

While browsing through Facebook a few months ago I saw those weird ‘Wish’ ads, I started flicking through the pictures and between the gross belly bag and the dog fetish masks I saw ‘fake money’. I clicked on the link and it said the fake money was free -just pay shipping. So I payed the £3 shipping and 2 weeks later I had a stack of fake money!

I used a Sharpie to ‘alter’ the face of Benjamin Franklin, giving him a beard, glasses and a top hat. on the back I simply wrote ‘@JoshMaddocks’ so however they choose to find me they can.

I’m telling you give it a try, even if everyone does the same thing I would much rather find a banknote on the floor than have to feel guilty for not taking something that probably doesn’t apply to me.

Plus it’s amazing to go to a restaurant and drop one on the floor and watch as the next person to walk by it picks it up and handles my flyer as if it was worth $100 and to see them sneak it into their pocket in the hopes nobody will see.

I would love to know your thoughts, and if you found this interesting let me know, even if it’s just a ‘like’ it helps me out endlessly. 

-Josh Maddocks