They got people hooked

THE PRINCIPLE

Expose people to your products any way you can – if they like it they’ll pay for more

In 1999 Moby’s album Play was not selling well. He licensed all of the album’s 18 tracks for use in commercials, television shows or films – the first time this had been done. People were exposed to the music, liked it, wanted to hear more and ended up buying more than 10 million copies of the album around the world.

Wayne Gould didn’t invent Sudoku, but he did make it popular. Intrigued by a Sudoku book he saw in Tokyo, he wrote a computer program that generated Sudoku puzzles and rated their difficulty. His Pappocom Sudoku puzzles were picked up by more than 400 newspapers internationally. But instead of charging the ...

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