Marketing

And for $5,000 More, Your Own Vestal Virgin
An Arctic expedition pushes the boundaries of promotional hype By John Galvin

Sometime early this month, polar heavyweight Paul Schurke plans to undertake one of the odder quests in a world already overburdened with strange exploration feats. He and coleader Bill Martin will take eight neophytes on a 250-mile, unsupported, celestially navigated dogsled slog to the top of the world in commemoration of Robert Peary's infamous Last Dash to the Pole in 1909 ù a journey that most experts now concede Peary never completed. Perhaps the only thing stranger than the idea of reenacting a trip that failed to reach its goal is the way it will be promoted. Says Jeff Blumenfeld, a public relations strategist who has been working with expeditions for 18 years: "I've never seen anything like it."

Which brings us to Doug Hall, the expedition's chief pitchman. A self-described "total couch potato," the 40-year-old Hall amassed a fortune running Eureka Ranch, a corporate think tank in Ohio where companies pay up to $150,000 to brainstorm about new products. He also claims to be a 26th-generation descendent of William the Conquerer. Three years ago, Hall paid a visit to England, where he attended an auction and bought himself a lord-of-the-manor title for $17,000 ù an honorific that he now claims allows him to call himself Lord of Threshfield (a village in England's North Yorkshire) and imparts the additional perquisite of enabling him to confer knighthood upon anyone he chooses. Which, for the past six months, he has been doing for anyone willing to pony up $25,000 on behalf of the North Pole Aspirations Expedition.

For the record, Hall's title is nonhereditary, and his knighthoods do not enjoy official sanction from the Crown. ("The only person who can knight someone is the Queen," sniffs Clive Cheesman, the Rouge Dragon Pursuivant of the royal College of Arms, who presumably knows a thing or two about such matters.) So far, however, Hall's plan has worked beautifully. As of press time he had hauled in at least ten corporate sponsors, including Johnson & Johnson, American Express, Grape Nuts, and the Honey-Baked Ham Company. The donations each of these businesses make will go directly to the Great Aspirations charity, which aims "to inspire children's goals and dreams." The expedition gets the added publicity, and in return, the corporations will gain both exposure ù in the form of 500 million "media impressions" and display of their logos on the expedition's Web site ù and laurels, in the form of a knighting ceremony that Hall promises "will be appropriately pompous, with all the pageantry. I'm gonna wear a kilt."

If nothing else, Hall's gambit applies a new twist to an old game. "I've become a shameless outdoor mercenary," admits Schurke, "but Doug is coming out of the blue with a fresh approach, realizing that he has to do something to excite the marketplace." Well, that's one way of putting it. In the process, however, Hall seems to be setting a new standard for ludicrousness while raising eyebrows among veterans who thought they had seen it all. "I've been in this business 30 years, and I've never heard of anything like this," says Skip Yowell, founder of JanSport, who's employed a few promotional tricks of his own. "On the 1984 China Everest Expedition we had something called 'Back-a-Yak,' where people could literally sponsor a yak for $100. But knighthood? No."