Behind the Red Paperclip: The AP Pitch, the Bunny Suit, and the Housewarming

By the time Kyle MacDonald’s red-paperclip project reached its housewarming in Kipling, Saskatchewan, the phone in his house was ringing constantly.

Radio stations were calling. Someone was answering. Kyle and the people around him were talking with media about what was happening on site. It felt like the story had taken over the house, the town, and the phone line.

I remember Kyle passing out drink tickets in a bunny costume. I remember finding myself in the back of a police car, later becoming friends with an RCMP officer, and walking outside Kipling and seeing the Northern Lights.

That is not what I pictured when I first read about a guy trading a red paperclip on the internet.

The story that made me want to get involved

I don’t remember exactly where I first saw Kyle’s project. It was probably a blog post about online entrepreneurialism. The piece may have mentioned the Million Dollar Homepage, Kyle’s red-paperclip blog, or both.

The Million Dollar Homepage was a clever, commercial idea. Kyle’s project was different. It was a story unfolding in public, with each new trade giving the internet something else to follow. I could see the potential in that.

I sent Kyle a cold email. He politely told me he was fine on his own.

Then, a few weeks later, he got back in touch. The trades had slowed down. He was at the Coleman camping stove stage, and he wanted help creating momentum.

I’ve told the broader story in “Publicity, Publicity, Publicity”. You can also follow the trades in Kyle’s original project archive. This post is about what happened next: how we pitched the story and what it was like to help it travel.

The pitch that landed in the Associated Press

My first move was to start pitching media proactively.

I already knew a handful of journalists. I also paid for a media database, which let me search for writers who might be a fit. Kyle was living in Montreal, so I looked for an Associated Press writer in the Boston area, relatively close by.

I pitched Kyle’s project as something the world should pay attention to: an internet story about one person trading up, one step at a time, with the audience able to follow along.

That pitch connected with Brian Bergstein. An Associated Press story about Kyle ran on April 16, 2006. You can read the AP story as carried by the Seattle P-I.

The story captured Kyle before he reached the house in Kipling. It described the trades, his growing audience, and the year of free rent in Phoenix. A few days later, The Guardian covered that Phoenix step too, in “Red paper clip nets internet trader a house in Phoenix.”

That first AP coverage helped open the door to more attention. It gave other outlets a substantial piece to react to and a clear narrative to follow. One story led to another, and the project’s next chapter was always coming into view.

Kyle wanted the journey to stay real

As the attention grew, I saw how strongly Kyle cared about keeping the project personal and honest. He wanted the story to stay about the trades and the people he met along the way.

At one point, someone in the homebuilding world offered him a house in a subdivision. I remember thinking it was a nice house, maybe even a better one than the house he would ultimately get in Kipling. But Kyle wasn’t looking for the fastest route to a house. He cared about the journey and the human connections that made each trade mean something.

That instinct mattered. If he had simply taken the quickest offer and skipped the spirit of the project, the story might have ended sooner—but it would have been a different story.

When the town of Kipling made its offer, Kyle accepted a house in exchange for a movie role. His July 2006 post about 503 Main Street includes Kipling’s offer and his account of the housewarming: 11 of the 14 traders came, along with more than 3,500 other people.

The phone kept ringing

By the time of the Kipling events, the story had become a real-time media experience. We put Kyle’s home phone number online for media. It rang constantly. Radio stations called, and somebody was there to answer and talk about what was happening in town.

TV Guide magazine came to the housewarming and ran a story with photos. Kyle mentioned the interview in his blog. In his post about the ABC 20/20 segment and Kipling’s welcome, he notes that he had just interviewed with TV Guide and describes the cameras and the Mountie who witnessed the title signing.

You can also see the scale of the media run in Kyle’s press archive. His July entries include national and international television, newspapers, magazines, and radio. ABC’s World News Tonight story is one example from the house-trade moment.

Then there were the moments no press plan could have written. Kyle in a bunny outfit, handing out drink tickets. Me in the back of a police car. A walk that turned into a chance to see the Northern Lights.

The coverage and the spectacle were exciting, but what I remember most is how the whole thing still felt connected to people. The town was part of the story. The trades were personal. The audience had followed Kyle long enough to care about what happened when he finally arrived.

The work behind a story that kept growing

This was one of my early lessons in how PR can help a story find its audience. The idea was already there. Kyle had created something people wanted to follow. My work was to recognize its potential, find the right journalists, and help the story keep moving at the moments when attention could grow.

I still bring that same instinct to my work now. Start by listening for the story that’s already taking shape. Find the detail that makes it human. Then help it reach the people who will care enough to talk about it.

You can read my earlier reflection, “Publicity, Publicity, Publicity,” for the storytelling lessons I drew from the project. For a broader look at my work today, see Talent Tech PR for HR and TA companies and the Evan White PR projects page.