Brammo Bids More Than $17K for Crispin Interns on EBay - Adages - Advertising Age

Crispin Interns Will Ride With Brammo
Motorcycle Maker Bids More Than $17K for Help

Posted by Rupal Parekh on 05.27.09 @ 04:48 PM

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Crispin Porter & Bogusky's intern auction wrapped this afternoon, with the winning bid of $17,655 coming from a marketer right up Alex Bogusky's alley: Ashland, Ore.-based Brammo, maker of electric motorcycles.

Crispin's top creative and riding enthusiast launched the auction out of the blue last Monday on Twitter. Bidding began at $1, and in a matter of nine days, 44 bidders came out of the woodwork hoping to land a package of brand strategy and creative ideas from Crispin's summer interns. The bidding really intensified in the final hours; earlier today the highest bid was still about 10 G's.

Brammo CEO-Chairman Craig Bramscher didn't back get to Adages right away to tell us why his budding company was eager to entrust a campaign to a group of interns, let alone some found in a deal struck on eBay.

But Brammo -- by the looks of its website, anyway -- appears to embrace the interweb machine more than your average marketer. Its home page features a feed of Brammo blog mentions and Google News mentions, its contact page is a Google Map, and the bios of executive team members are all Diggable.

Like Crispin, which has a bike-sharing venture, Brammo is green-conscious. It purchases energy offsets and encourages employees to bike to work. (For its part, Crispin swears to us the contest wasn't rigged).

The outcome of the auction means that once again the agency has broken tradition when it comes to client conflicts. Crispin, which works with two big fast feeders (Burger King and Domino's), already has a motorcycle client in Buell Motorcycle Co., a division of Harley-Davidson.

This year's batch of Crispin interns have got to be stoked. Each of the 38 young talents will take home an extra $465 from the Brammo project to supplement their minimum-wage paychecks from the agency. Not bad.