I went downtown this afternoon to try to stick up a couple of ScreenScape posters. I wasn’t initially going to go today since it was cloudy all morning, but by 3:00 nothing had come down so I decided to test my luck – bad idea. The second I got off that bus the heavens opened up and spewed filthy harbor water upon my head.

I won’t show pictures of the locations that I have postered just yet – I want to see what ScreenScape will pay me first, since I tried a couple of different things and I want to evaluate their eligibility criteria. In the meantime, here is a basic timeline of the day – I only managed to get around fourteen posters up.

3:00 – Packed all my supplies into a bag – ready to plaster the masses. Brought along a friend.

3:15 – Walked down the hill to the Rockingham Community Centre – I was denied placement on the noticeboard
3:25 – Walked a little more down the road to Mount Saint Vincent University. Managed to place two posters in the building. Got on a bus and headed downtown.
4:00 – Reached downtown, and started to hit up several coffee shops and bars on Spring Garden Road. Also managed to plaster the Public Library. Left a couple of brochures in strategic venues. The rain is downpouring at this point. Managed seven posters so far in total. Took a bus to Saint Mary’s University.

4:40 – Visited several academic buildings and locations within SMU. Put up seven posters (and spotted another ScreenScape poster already on a noticeboard! There’s another hired student in Halifax it seems). Also attempted to use a couple of stickers.
5:30 – Was going to visit Dalhousie to complete my route, but gave up postering for the day and decided to check out the Parade of Lights since the rain had let up.
7:30 – Torrential rain began falling from the sky, the parade people and spectators are soaked, and I decide to jet early and catch a bus home.

9:05 – I began uploading the venues via ScreenScape’s Facebook ‘Submit a Venue’ tool. I had placed fourteen posters in total today, but made a claim for fifteen locations.
9:20 – Completed the submission process. They are all currently pending approval.

The amount of time which I would consider ‘work’ (a.k.a, not on a bus) came to about two and a half hours. If I receive $2.00 for each of the fifteen locations, that translates to around $12.00/hr. That’s a pretty decent salary, and well above minimum wage!

I was not able to get as many posters up today as I would have liked. Granted the day was poorly planned – I should have left much earlier (which would have allowed me to avoid the rain in the evening) and not have chosen a day which coincides with the Parade of Lights (many of the roads were blocked off leading to loooong bus waits). However, aside from that, it was much more difficult than I anticipated to find venues that would allow posters (especially since they were not advertising a local event, but a company), and not many had community noticeboards. I didn’t feel comfortable sticking up the posters directly on bare walls as I thought this disrespectful and frustrating for venue owners. Because of this, the majority of the posters I managed to stick up were in University locations, as they contain a plethora of noticeboards. Attempts to vary my ‘venue type’ was therefore pretty difficult, they either fell under ‘Food&Drink’ or more commonly ‘Civic’.

Taking pictures was a relatively painless process. However it was hard to get a good feel of the venue if you’re basically taking a picture of a wall. It’s very difficult to communicate a great location if the photograph can’t capture any people or demonstrate a waiting area or longue. However taking wall photos may also mask the dead-ness or perhaps inappropriateness of a location.

Alright, I guess you can see one photo. Walls do not lend themselves to a proper representation of location. This is a bustling coffee shop - no, really.

As anticipated in my previous post, the stickers had a hard time finding a home. I honestly had no idea where to put them. Walls were out of the question, since they’d be a pain to peel off and would probably damaged paint. They were also large enough to obscure the flyers of anyone else. I only used them in one location as an experiment – feeling guilty as I plastered five or six stickers over other people’s ads. There’s no way I’m going to be able to go through the packet of 50.

The brochures, on the other hand, proved to be more useful. I attached one or two with a thumbtack to a poster in strategic locations – specifically noticeboards where I saw the ads of various other small businesses. I figured that they would be able to take along a brochure if it caught their eye the next time they swung by to put up their own ads. Unfortunately since I was only given ten brochures, these ran out rather quickly.

The submission process was not too painful – it took fifteen minutes to complete fifteen submissions (this was also factored in the time I considered ‘work’). That comes to the tune of one minute/submission. Unfortunately you have to select the City, Province, and Country each time your submit – I’d much prefer a way to ‘set’ these since you’re likely not going to be moving from city to city just to stick up posters. They also require a ‘Street Address’, which is pretty difficult to find on venues like bars or libraries or Universities. I only managed to fill out the full street address for a couple of venues, and just used the street name for the rest. Hopefully this still counts as a complete submission.

I’m planning to hit several outdoor noticeboards that I know of tomorrow, then my University (Dalhousie). Dal is pretty large and I know it quite well – getting the remainder of the posters up there shouldn’t be too much of a problem, but I’m thinking 30 posters within a single institution may be pushing it a little. However as I said, I’m finding it pretty difficult to find privately owned locations that have space and allow people to put up ads and I know my city well – this may be an easier job for Street Team Members in larger cities. However if ScreenScape is not stringent with the eligibility process, the potential per hour salary seems worthwhile!

Alright, let’s rip this parcel open, and expose it’s glossy innards for all to see.

I was curious to see approx. how much ScreenScape has spent to mail and create the supplies. Remember that ScreenScape is $9.54 in the hole so far, that’s the cost of shipping the package.

First up is free plastering supplies. Two black sharpie markers for marking the posters, a package of one hundred brass thumbtacks, a roll of double-sided mounting tape, and two blocks of sticky tack. A pack of 12 black sharpie markers comes to $9.99 on the Staples website. 2 markers would therefore cost about $1.67. A package of 100 brass thumbtacks is $1.96. The double-sided mounting tape is $3.56 a roll, and the two blocks of sticky tack (‘adhesive putty’) is $2.36. The total cost of poster-sticking supplies comes to $9.55. So that’s nearly $10.00 of free useful stuff even if you don’t do any work. Schweet.

Next is a package of wrapped stickers. There are about 50 in a pack, and just look like smaller versions of the ScreenScape posters. They have perforated peel-off backs, which will thankfully spare my nails. I was expecting the stickers to be smaller and thus easier to plaster around, but these are pretty large (4″x6″). I’m not really sure where I should stick these – they’d damage walls and cover too much of other people’s flyers. I guess that’s a big deal if I’m supposed to be, you know, courteous. The printed supplies are a little harder to price, since I’m not sure which company ScreenScape used. I did a search on printing services in PEI and came up with ‘Plus Printing’. It looks like this company does handle stickers so I’ll base my guess-prices off of there. Each sticker would run around 40 cents to print. For 50 stickers, that’s another $20.00 cost for ScreenScape.

You’re also given 10 fancy-smanzhy double-sided tri-fold brochures on THICK paper. These were also a little hard to price – it looks like with a double-sided print on the thick glossy card-stock, coupled with the cost for folding, each brochure should cost around $1.50. Thus the total cost for printing the brochures is $15.00.

And finally, the meat of the package – the posters themselves. I’m supposed to have received 50 in my starter pack (you can ask for more if you use them all up). They’re printed one-sided on thinner, glossy paper, and measures 11″x17″. You can see a comparison with a regular sheet of paper here, it’s quite a bit larger. The space on the bottom is where you’re supposed to write the venue name with the provided sharpies. You can see a much larger version of the ScreenScape Poster here. Full colour 11″x17″ posters on glossy paper is $1.00 each. If we assume there are 50 in the starter pack, it cost ScreenScape $50.00 to print the posters. Ouch.

So in total, the ScreenScape package contained: two sharpies, double-sided mounting tape, thumbtacks, stock tack, stickers, brochures, posters, and some photocopied-sheets explaining venue-plastering procedures and a grid to keep track of your posters. In total, the cost of purchasing, printing, and mailing these supplies comes to ~$104.09. Keep in mind they probably would get some sort of discount since they’re bulk-ordering this stuff, but that’s still close to $100 out of ScreenScape’s pocket for each person they hire, and that’s BEFORE they pay the $2.00 – $3.00/poster salary. And even though they mail you all this extra stuff, you are only paid for the POSTERS that you put up – not for the brochures you leave lying around or the stickers you slap everywhere. ScreenScape does mention that there are bonuses involved for going the extra mile and using the brochures/stickers, but this incentive isn’t fully explained. Also you don’t need to submit any proof of sticker or brochure-ing. Presumably the ‘secret ScreenScape members’ who check your work will also alert HQ if they see you’re doing extra work, but it seems like a lot of work and good luck for the possibility of an unknown bonus.

But we’ll see. I have some time this weekend to trek downtown and put these posters up. Stay tuned, and I’ll let you know just how long you can expect the job to be.

Holy smokes that was fast! After applying and being accepted as a ScreenScape Street Team member earlier this week, I’ve already received the package of supplies in the mail (took a total of 4 days – one of those being a holiday). Being a Canuck and an avid eBay shopper, I’m used to waiting 3-4 weeks for parcels to arrive. However it looks like these ScreenScape parcels are being mailed from Charlottetown, PEI, which is just a couple of provinces away. Canadians signing up for this program can therefore expect their parcel to arrive pretty quickly.

The package was gigantic, and pretty heavy.

I think it’ll be a neat idea to see just how much ScreenScape is spending out-of-pocket to hire ME, and from that try to guesstimate how much of their product they need to sell to at least break even.

A quick check with Canadian Post shows that a package 18x12x1.5″ at 1.9kg cost them $9.54 to mail from Charlottetown to Halifax in three business days.

Check back soon to see the contents of the package – I’ll also try to put a price on all this stuff.

While getting my daily distraction fix on facebook, I noticed an ad in the sidebar promising $150 to stick up 50 posters around my neighborhood.

Being a student at the largest University in the Maritimes, and growing up in my home town of Halifax, I figured that I knew the city well enough to spam its bulletin boards with posters. I would be performing some street-level marketing for ScreenScape (just a link to the facebook application for now, they have their own website but no mention of the advertising job as far as I can see). Their program allows users to display news tickers or menus, sell rich media advertising, play videos, etc. on LCD TV screens to keep their patrons entertained.

The payout looks decent for a ScreenScape Street Team member – $2.00 per poster, an extra $50 if I stick up 50 posters within my first two weeks (which comes to $3.00 per poster!). However it’s not just the poster-sticking that gets you the cash – a sharpie pen is used to create a subdomain for each location you plaster (ex. spiffyowl.screenscape.net) to a) help draw attention to the poster and b) prove that you didn’t just stick up fifty posters in the same building. Each and every poster also needs to be photographed and documented to prove that you actually put it up (they’ve also employed ‘secret street team ninjas members’ who periodically check on your work). Upon returning home, you will need to fill out an individual form for each poster, uploading the photo, location, venue type, and subdomain. And it seems that your earnings are still not guaranteed – ScreenScape admins will review each submission and will grant the $2.00 based on the quality of the venue! I can’t comment on how strict this review process is as of yet, but it will certainly make or break the deal.

Suddenly putting up 50 posters seems like a lot of work, but I’m not too quick to dismiss it. I signed up on facebook and quickly received a reply the next day letting me know that I was on the team. I’m currently waiting for my free package to arrive in the mail (they provide the posters, along with a sharpie marker, sticky tack, and scotch tape). Once I’ve earned a minimum of $50, they are supposed to mail me a check.

Currently it looks like this program is limited to those living in Canada or the United States. You will need to be 16 or over, and provide an address (so they can mail you your package and checks) and tell them a little about yourself.

There are other ways to make money with this program – they allude to bonuses for plastering stickers and leaving brochures in appropriate places. A currently poorly-defined referral system also seems to factor into these bonuses as well (I’ve asked them if they will set up a system to perhaps track the number of referrals and grant me a % of their earnings, still waiting to hear back on this).

I don’t know how long it will take to find places to stick up these posters and report them, but once I receive the package I’ll document my day and review the program on the Spiffy Owl!