Newspapers and Magazines
Each of our distributors had access to advertising that they could download in .pdf format directly from their private member area within the Acorn Kids website. They would enter their personal details, select the advert size, choose how many colours the advert should contain and click submit. The software would automatically email them a personalised .pdf file with a high-resolution image of the advert. They simply needed to submit it to the magazine or newspaper. The distributors paid for the advertising and all sales and recruits generated by their adverts accrued to them. This was extremely effective as there was seldom a day where Acorn Kids did not appear in one of the key family magazines, community papers, and knock and drop publications. One night I ordered a pizza and found our advert blasted across the pizza box. We estimated that our distributors were placing an average of $33,000 worth of advertising each month.

Press Releases
Each week we created a press release and sent it to our network using our bulk communication module within the Acorn Kids system. We encouraged our distributors to get it published in their local newspapers, on appropriate forums, relevant blogs and anywhere else they could think of. We made sure that the release was interesting, well written and newsworthy for our target market. It became a competition between the top leaders to try and secure the key print and online media slots for their press release. I am not able to put a Dollar value to this but it was effective and I would not leave it out of the mix. 

Understand why and how your audience uses technology and then start trying to align your communication efforts - Brian Reich and Dan Solomon