Drew called into the Steve Dahl Chicago radio show yesterday. Yep, he’s been quiet for 5 weeks – time to fire up the ole Drew Peterson Marketing Machine.

First, let’s revisit the DP School of Marketing lessons from 2007:

1. Kill wife #3
2. Kill wife #4
3. Launch popular website for financial gain

At the DP School of Marketing, we can’t rest on our past accomplishments alone.  No, we must look to the future and leave nothing to fate.  Write these steps down:

1. Create an outrageous statement.
2. Use radio and TV personalities for publicity.
3. Launch popular website for financial gain. I see this one coming soon – DateDrew.com.

The dynamic Drewul called into the top Chicago radio morning show to proclaim Drew is ready to date. Joel Brodsky, attorney and oracle of missing persons theories, participated in yesterday’s on-air publicity stunt.

Like clockwork, Joel was featured on the Today show with Matt Lauer exactly 24 hours later (1/24). Paraphrasing the Today show ->

• Matt: Stacy’s been missing for 3 months.  Is Drew ready to date?
• Joel: He’s open to it since Stacy dumped him. He’s ready to move on.
• Matt: How can you say that she left him?
• Joel: She took $25K and she did what her mother did. She just left.
• Matt: How could a 23 year old mother, housewife and most famous missing person in America pull off such a mastermind disappearing act? If she left with another man, why isn’t he missing too?
• Joel: mumble, mumble, mumble….

Outrageous is as outrageous does. That’s our motto at the Drew Peterson School of Marketing.         

The Defend Drew Peterson website, defenddrew.com, was set up to get donations for Drew’s legal defense – Joel Brodsky. He has not yet been charged or named a suspect in his 3rd wife’s death or 4th wife’s disappearance. But the site was overwhelmed with 1/2 million hits in 4 or 5 hours. Perhaps they should distribute the traffic across several websites:

Chicago radio personality Steve Dahl offered these improvements:

• For a $10 donation to Drew, you will receive a commemorative bullet hole shaped magnet. – Stacy said Drew fired a shot in their home, Drew said she fired it from her Glock.
• For $25, you get a “Come Back, Stacy” boomerang.

They shut down the site within 48 hours and released this:
“The Drew Peterson Legal Defense Fund has met its short term goal, so we are shutting down the web site. Peterson thanks the public for their generous response to his request for support. If additional support is needed in the future we may reestablish the web site.”

Alexa Traffic stats for DefendDrew.com show they peaked at #21,000 in worldwide website traffic rank. eBay is #20 for comparison. However, Alexa does a 3 day average on their stats. This pulls down 1 day spikes in traffic by 2/3. Accounting for this, I guestimate the site actually peaked around top #10,000 on Dec 12. Anything above #100,000 is pretty impressive, especially when the site is open for just 2 days.

I did a rough calculation based on my own Alexa relative stats and actual quantitative Statcounter stats. I come up with 100,000 hits to defenddrew.com on Dec. 12, not 1,000,000. Anyone else have any stats on this site’s traffic?

Heard of Drew Peterson? He’s the 53 year old retired Bolingbrook, IL, police sargent who’s 23 year old wife, Stacy, went missing on Oct 28. Well, he lives close to me.

In fact, I live within 4 miles of two allegedly murdered women. Lisa Stebic was a Lunch Lady at my daughter’s elementary school. Lisa went missing on May 1, 2007.

Drew Peterson has been a laughable, self-centered suspect from the beginning. He’s entertained and appalled me with his American flag scarf over his face, multiple interviews on the Today show, interviews with Dr. Phil and now, on his own website. www.DefendDrew.com was set up by Drew Peterson and his attorney to help with defense costs.

Now, the DefendDrew.com website is either down or their server has been overwhelmed by traffic. They said they got over 1 million hits yesterday. It’s contents are pretty consistent with everything he’s said or done over the past month. One photo of Drew and Stacy and then 6 Paypal “Donate Now” buttons at the bottom with amounts from $5 to $250. If 0.1% of the alleged 2 million visitors to his website donated $5 each, then he would get $10K. I can’t see more than a fraction of a percent of the people donating anything.

Update: The lawyer closed the site after just 36 hours stating: 1. they “achieved what they wanted” and 2. it was a lightning bolt attracting too much attention. It’s a marketers dream! Too much traffic. Let’s write this recipe down: 1. kill 3rd wife, 2. kill 4th wife, 3. wear American flag scarf over face, … Launch hugely popular website! 

DefendDrew.com shows “closed”. No HTML, just the word closed. What’s really weird is that the site is hosted in Hong Kong. Who in the world hosts their site in Hong Kong, the land of expensive real estate?