Some Blog Site

I don’t know how sales of Monopoly are going. But if the Parker Brothers have some excess inventory that they need to move, I have an idea.

Even if they don’t need to sell more games, I still have an idea.

Make some games with real money instead of Monopoly money.

Kind of like the Golden Tickets of Willy Wonka fame. Just advertise that 10 random Monopoly games contain actual currency and see how well they sell.

Last I checked, Monopoly is sold with $15,140 of Monopoly money. I picked the count of 10 games because that would be $151,400 – close enough to the cost of producing and airing a TV commercial so it should fit in an advertising budget.

Better yet, plan the viral route: don’t advertise that those sets are being sold. Just make a few and send them to stores like any other game. Chances are good that some local TV news station will report that someone bought a Monopoly set filled with real money

reporter voice: “Too good to be true? Find out what happened to one lucky family when they went shopping! That story and more on your local news at 10.”

Once the story breaks, wait for it to gain coverage and wait for a news reporter to contact you. Then you can release a statement that you had been planning an advertising campaign with Monopoly games that contained US dollars instead of play currency [insert own joke about the federal reserve, bonus for mentioning gold or silver], but a few of the games got shipped before the ad materials were released.

That should start a buying spree.

Of course, the problem with planning a viral campaign is that some people might see through it – “you mean to tell me that their quality control is so poor that they don’t know what boxes were shipped?“.

And since Monopoly has been producing new games with a credit card instead of piles of cash, this might not work so well anymore (“Some games contain a real debit card” doesn’t have the same ring as “Some games contain a pile of real cash”). But if they have a stash of paper money-based games that they want to clear out, this idea would work well for that.

This could also apply to the game of Life, but that has way too much money. Monopoly has tens of thousands of dollars per game; Life has millions of dollars per game. It wouldn’t be worth it, even if it was only one game. Unless they didn’t mind losing money on an ad campaign…