The "URL Hunt" is my new favorite marketing game 🕹️
5 marketing ideas worth stealing.
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#1
The “URL Hunt” is the simplest challenge you’ll ever run
At Wiz, we had a sleep-themed booth at a conference.
So we bought 30+ domains like wizzz.io, wizzzzzzz.io, and wizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.io… Each with a different number of Z’s 💤
Only one URL showed a winner page.
Visitors had to guess the right number of Z’s to win swag.
People went nuts. They kept coming back to our booth to try again. Some of them pulled out their laptops and wrote scripts to brute-force every URL at once 😂
When your audience starts coding to beat your game, you’ve won.
My take: Works for conferences, but also for social posts, newsletters, product launches, whatever. Buy a few domains for $10-30 each, hide something fun behind one of them, and give people a clue. Easiest game ever.
#2
How hard is it to respect women at conferences?
In 2024, Palo Alto Networks used women as human lamp holders at an event:
They got absolutely destroyed online. CISOs did not like it.
The CEO had to publicly apologize.
Last week, it happened again:
At LegalWeek in New York, a company called Zantaz put up a booth featuring an AI-generated woman in a tight red dress and text “Who knows what she really wants...”
The company’s president said this was “the type of attention our entire design team was hoping for”.
Yikes.
Here’s a marketing idea for you all: Put women on stage, not on display. Make sure they get a mic, a panel, a keynote slot, a quote on the website. It’s really not that difficult. Come on.
#3
The best RSA strategy is skipping RSA
Your LinkedIn feed is probably drowning in “Meet me at RSA!” posts.
RSA fatigue before it even started.
Clover Security saw this mess, and their CEO posted this gem:
They set up a matcha bar at a separate location nearby. No booth noise, just good conversations. I love it.
My take: When everyone screams “MEET ME AT THE CONFERENCE” → be the person who offers a break from it. We took the same approach at Wiz and put a “No-AI Zone” outside of RSA.
Sometimes the best marketing is just letting people take a break.
#4
Tell people what to buy with the money they’ll save
Senja sends this email to help users switch to annual billing:
That’s ridiculously funny.
My take: This is the kind of email people screenshot and post on LinkedIn/X (which is exactly how I found it). If your product saves people money or time, show them something stupid they could do with it. That one email becomes free marketing.
#5
Screenshot marketing still works
I wrote a full article about screenshots a while back.
This week, the social app Poke put what looks like an internal team chat on a highway billboard.
My take: Ads look like ads. Screenshots look like accidents. That’s the whole game.
Have a great week ✌️
