I’m not a Dell customer and I’m not really interested in any of their products right now, but I’m a sucker for unique marketing campaigns, and the YoursIsHere campaign totally caught my eye. So I did a little digging just in case you wanted to know more without actually doing the work.

You’ve probably seen the commercials by now. Burt Reynolds, looking and sounding stately, interrupts a young man’s attempt to request a Dell laptop for Xmas because the fella isn’t famous. The message of the ad seems to be that you’re more likely to get what you want if you enlist a celebrity for your cause. The YoursIsHere website is designed to let you do just that. You can choose from an array of celebrities including Burt Reynolds, Chuck Liddell, Vivica Fox, Ice T, and Brooke Burke, all of which will help recruit funds via cheeky sales pitches that you can link to or add to MySpace or Facebook.

If you want a Dell for Xmas, setting up your celebrity sales rep is probably easy enough to do in your sleep. It took me less than 2 minutes to complete the whole process and I was definitely awarded with amusement for my efforts. Chipping in is just as easy. If you’re thoroughly impressed with the sales pitch and believe that I deserve an electronic device, you can click on the ChipIn button, get redirected to paypal, and if you already have an account you just enter the dollar amount and you’re good to go. Very smart and very simple.

Check out Brooke Burke’s soft sell approach to winning me a Dell electronic device, which I could have chosen to add to my MySpace or Facebook accounts although I’m not really in the market for a Dell electronic device, so I opted not to do this (although feel free to donate funds). There’s also a cute widget for blogs, but I was unable to embed it, so here’s a screenshot:

I really think that Dell has found a clever and fun way to marry new media and sales. I’m curious to see if the campaign is successful. I have to believe that the celebrities were compensated nicely for their time, the ad spots are pricey, and the time spent on the YoursIsHere site appears to be substantial. I’d be curious to know what they spent putting this together, how they define success, and if customers are actually using the service. I have a gut feeling that this is a little overkill and may not satisfy enough customers’ needs to justify the costs, but I’ve been known to be wrong and wish this creative campaign success so that we can all benefit from more things like this in the future.

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