That’s right! I received my cheque from Screenscape just yesterday, sweet deal.

One of the staff actually told me they would only be sent out once a month, and that the November cheques would be mailed today, so either they made an exception for me or decided to send them out early. If it’s the latter, I hope they change their payout scheme at least to once every two weeks – if they can approve poster submissions on the weekend, they should be able to fill out cheques more often than once a month!

At any rate, I’m $150 richer, and pretty pumped that I’ve covered a good portion of my holiday shopping. Complete review of the ScreenScape program coming soon.

That’s right, I’ve successfully put up 50 posters, and all my claims have been confirmed (I was supposed to put in 50 claims, but I think I may have missed one). Each poster translates to a minimum of $2.00 each. You can see the total amount ‘Pending payment’ of my account in the image above.

Since all 50 posters were put up within two weeks, I should also be receiving an additional $50.00 bonus. This doesn’t show up in my Account Information, but I’m assuming that it will come with the check. I submitted my claims on Friday night I believe, and they were approved by Saturday afternoon. The check is supposed to automatically be mailed out when my account hits $50.00 – which means that it should have been mailed out today (Monday morning) and should arrive within the week.

Fingers crossed!

Phew! It’s been a busy week class-wise, and it’s still crunch time before the final exams. Also my Wordpress blog is acting up and giving my grief. However I did manage to make some progress with ScreenScape, and finally stuck up the last of fifty posters today. I’ll fill you in more on what’s been happening once I have a spare moment, but here are some quick stats for now:

Total time needed to place posters*: 5 hrs and 50 mins
Total time needed to submit venues online: 35 mins
TOTAL TIME NEEDED TO COMPLETE JOB: 6 hrs and 25 mins

*transportation to and from CIRCUITS was not included (similar to the way you would not be paid for the time it takes to get to and leave work). Transportation time between poster-plastering within a single circuit was included.

I just submitted my last chunk of claims and they are all currently pending. I put up 50 posters in total, used up all my brochures, and a handful of stickers. I put 51 claims in to ScreenScape (50 being for the posters, 1 being for brochures left at a location). If all my venues are accepted, the projected base pay for this job comes to $102. Since I have made more than 50 claims within my first two weeks, I should also be receiving an additional $50 bonus, bringing the total pay up to $152.

This translates to a projected salary of $23.40 an hour, which is significantly larger than my previous post.

ScreenScape is usually very quick on the ball with approving submissions, keep checking back here and I’ll stick up a note once they’ve been confirmed. By then I would have met and overshot the $50 minimum payout, so we’ll see how quickly the check arrives.

To note: some ScreenScape staff have been checking out this blog, and have acted on one of my suggestions to make the ‘Submit a Venue’ form a little more user-friendly. Now it remembers the last city and country you’ve been in, so you don’t have to select it down from a drop-down menu each time you make a claim. Might not seem like a big deal, but those wasted seconds could have really added up, so thanks!

Much to my surprise, it looks like at least a couple of ScreenScape staff are working the weekend shift. Within a day of submitting photos for approval, they have all been confirmed. There wasn’t a single rejection.

I did experiment with several poster locations, and I’m glad to see that the eligibility criteria isn’t as strict as I initially thought. Even though I was not able to provide a full street address for most of the venues, I was still awarded the $2.00. For one location, there were no places to stick up posters – though I noticed that many ads were left along the windowsill. I left two brochures there instead, and was still credited for that location. I was worried that I may have put up too many posters in SMU, but each one I submitted from there was confirmed as well – even a poster that I stuck up on a random wall in front of a water fountain. *thumbs*

What was not acknowledged (at least not yet) were locations where ScreenScape brochures/stickers were clearly visible. I made sure that these items were included within the picture, but so far I haven’t received any extra compensation for that work. Again, handing out brochures/putting up stickers is supposed to fall under ‘potential for bonuses’, and employees are not given a set rate for the extra work.

It’s been raining all day today as well, and the weather does not look good for the next week. I wasn’t able to get any more posters up today, and I’m going to be swamped with other work in a very short period of time – I really want to attempt to put up the ’50 posters within two weeks’ to qualify for the $50.00 ‘bonus’, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it. At any rate, once I hit at least 25 posters ($50.00), a check is supposed to be automatically mailed to my doorstep. Will keep you updated about payday.

Something I haven’t touched yet, though I should have, is the whole general idea behind ScreenScape’s Marketing techniques.

The approach they’ve taken – hiring young, enthusiastic people who know their city well – is nothing new. Many companies employ a similar type of technique through the use of ‘Campus Representatives’. Hired students with an established network of friends, who are promised awesome perks for promoting certain products. Apple does this – Campus Reps help promote iPods and Macs by throwing Apple parties/concerts and giving away free products. I often see a highly branded ‘smart car’ zipping around my campus promoting the energy drink Red Bull – they usually hit up University sporting events and give out the drinks for free. Certain travel companies also employ campus reps, giving them free trips for organizing a group of friends to participate in spring-break getaways.

However, the way that ScreenScape uses its employees is different and novel – they invest quite a bit upfront (close to $100 for a starter package) and pay for performance instead of # of sales. In other words, you are paid directly for the posters you put up – it doesn’t matter if anyone reads it, tries it, or buys it, you still pocket some cash. I haven’t seen this type of technique used by any other company, and I actually think it’s both a very clever way to advertise, and provides fair returns for the hired student.

ScreenScape is also a small, new company, and spending this kind of cash on street-level advertising must be a fairly large risk. The staff are therefore quite dedicated to making this work – the communication with street team members is quick and thoughtful, and you get the feeling that there is support available when you need it. The fact that they mail you poster-sticking supplies along with their advertisements shows that they have thought this through and are trying hard to make it easy for the street team to do their job.

For their sake, I really want to see this work. Especially since they are a small, local (close enough, us Maritimers gotta stick together), and smart start-up. Catching the attention of local businesses is exactly what they need to sell their kind of product, and once one venue uses it I’m guessing their hope is that it will spread like wildfire throughout the city. Using a sharpie to scrawl the venue name on each poster is another extremely insightful and clever strategy to catch the attention of the venue owner (but the overly excited lady looking like she’s receiving the blessings of the Screen-Display gods, eh… but whatever works). Paying the street team member a reasonable amount for each poster and providing all the necessary tools needed to do the job shows respect for their employees. They know the target market of their product, and the ‘target market’ of the type of people they employ, and use a very intelligent marketing campaign to bring the two together.

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!