GOOD IDEA: Ben Stiller’s $50,000 self-portrait

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Cause Effect Agency

We are big fans of Ben Stiller’s hilarious Stillerstrong charity project. For those who may not have heard of it, the campaign offers Stillerstrong-branded headbands (a parody/homage to Lance Armstrong’s iconic yellow Livestrong wristbands) in exchange for donations to Haitian relief efforts.

Since its launch in 2009, Stillerstrong has maintained its momentum through clever use of social media, and by publicly engaging several of Stiller’s real-life celebrity friends (Conan O’Brien, Robert DeNiro, Owen Wilson). Its latest fundraising initiative, however, was based around a single photograph of the actor himself.

Stiller made a number of public appearances at the 2010 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, in part to promote an upcoming web series of his that is slated to run exclusively on Yahoo. On June 22, at the end of a standing-room only seminar with Jeff Goodby and Yahoo Chief Marketing Officer Elisa Steele, Stiller invited his co-panelists to don Stillerstrong headbands and pose with him for a photo that would be posted on Yahoo’s Flickr photo sharing site. For every page view that the photo received, Yahoo agreed to donate $1 to the Stillerstrong cause, up to a total of $50,000.

Stillerstrong announced the pledge on Facebook and Twitter, and the 50,000 pageview target was met in under 10 hours. The photo went on to receive nearly 100,000 views in less than one week.

View the photo here, and visit www.stillerstrong.org to learn more about the ongoing campaign.