Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Dennis Crowley, Best Buy Spokesguy (Video)

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley gets plenty of media coverage, including a one-time stint as a Gap model. But this is the first time I’ve seen him on TV:

This is part of Best Buy’s “College Innovator” campaign, and apparently started airing this weekend, timed to the Olympics. But I’m pretty sure I saw it while fast-fowarding through “Breaking Bad” on DVR last night.

Obviously, this is a push into the mainstream for Foursquare, so that’s nice for those guys.

Based on a survey of one, though, I’m not sure it’s an effective campaign for Best Buy, or Sprint, which gets a tag at the end. I spent the morning searching YouTube in vain for “Dennis Crowley Foursquare AT&T” — perhaps because the “smartphone” Crowley fidgets with throughout the ad, but never identifies, appears to be an AT&T model.

But I still had some recall. So that’s something, right?

I’ve asked Crowley and Foursquare’s PR rep for comment, but haven’t heard back. To be fair, Crowley seems to be spending a lot of time right now trying to get NBC’s livestream onto his flat screen (apparently Boxee works).

Update: Here’s Foursquare’s Erin Gleason:

We’d been talking to Best Buy for a few months about having Dennis participate in an ad campaign similar to the one they ran during the Super Bowl, featuring Kevin Systrom and others. We worked closely with them to develop a concept that both sides were excited about. We thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce the all-new foursquare to a large audience. And as a side benefit, we were able to donate the fee from the shoot to CampInteractive, a non-profit that Dennis, myself, and several other foursquare employees are involved with.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik