USA TODAY 25th ANNIVERSARY TOUR CONCEPT

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, USA TODAY sought out innovative grassroots marketing ideas.

• My idea: Conduct a nationwide tour of an enormous time capsule, soliciting items and stories along the way from people in towns and cities everywhere, with entries going into the capsule.
• Moreover, at each stop, we’d enlist local newspeople and student journalists to create a one-of-a-kind, collectible “micro-local edition” of USA TODAY for just their community.
• And at tour’s end, the entire capsule would have been interred for 25 years, at a massive P.R. event!
• They ultimately spent their money on traditional media, but their publisher and CMO called our idea “brilliant.”