Pound another nail into altruism’s coffin.
Improv Everywhere, an organization that “causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places,” recently partnered with Yahoo! to help promote the company’s new “Start Wearing Purple” campaign.
“It was a good fit,” said Improv Everywhere founder Charlie Todd in a video produced by AdAge. According to Todd, purple is the color of Yahoo!, and wearing purple meant being spontaneous and doing things that were fun and off the cuff—qualities inherent to his organization.
Presumably, Improv Everywhere will help Yahoo! spread its brand via their expertise in organizing large homogenous communities virtually, and virally, via Web 2.0 concepts like text messaging, mobile smart phones, and online gathering places.
In turn, Yahoo! will sponsor Improv Everywhere’s next MP3 Experiment, where participants download a particular MP3 file, show up at a location at a specific time and place, and press play on their MP3 listening device at the same time. The MP3 file then gives the participants a set of participatory actions to perform.
Founded in 2001, Improv Everywhere is the organization behind an annual “No Pants” event, in which participants from New York City and nine other cities across the world rode subway trains sans pants. In 2006, eight members of the troupe were arrested by the New York City Police for the stunt; charges against them for disorderly conduct were later dismissed. In 2005, the organization staged a fake U2 concert atop a New York City rooftop just hours before the real band was to play at Madison Square Garden.