Every now and then I find myself sitting in a coffee shop slurping up as much caffeine as I can afford while coding away on the next “big” thing (kidding, obviously I mean’t “biggest”). There’s something mystical about a good coffee shop that allows me to get more work done. Maybe it has something to do with the atmosphere or the white noise, but I surely feel very productive. In any case, I like going to coffee shops, but it doesn’t make me any money.

Occasionally someone will come up and talk to me at a coffee shop asking if I like my MacBook Air (spoiler: I do, very much) or how I like my ear buds. Rarely does anyone talk to me about anything that isn’t physically present unless waiting in line to use the bathroom. There aren’t conversations about what I do, where I’m from, what I’m drinking or about something that happened in the paper.

Time to change that, now.

The lid of my laptop makes for a great canvas to display stickers or artwork, but what’s better than that? Advertising.

And not the anti-social/non personal advertising that billboards or television ads offer. They blast out a message to everyone instead of encouraging conversation or personalization. Those aren’t good enough and they aren’t like this.

This type of advertising has a different goal. It encourages interpersonal communication. It is both social and personal and hopefully it will drum up more conversations and therefore business. Here’s what it looks like:

In the past I’ve done some A/B testing with road signs and found out that the number one sign color combo when dealing with text is black on yellow. It’s the most visible and always resulted in the most phone calls (we tested a vast array of color combinations) so the design is the most optimal towards completing the goal. That is, this will hopefully give me the best shot at having people come up and talk to me while sitting in a coffee shop.

I’ve never seen anyone do this. I’ve seen people reserve the space on their laptop for stickers or artwork, but never this type of self promotion. (Maybe I don’t get out enough?) Either people have tried and failed, or no one has tried at all.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be testing out this variation of the laptop skin and discussing my results.

In the mean time, you should follow me on twitter.