Why I explicitly included "parbunkells" in this post's title

PYMNTS.COM has an interesting story about an artist and a billboard:

[Julia] Weist, a New York-based artist, was allocated unused billboard space belonging to outdoor advertising company Lamar by artist initiative 14×48. The latter organization’s very purpose is to temporarily re-purpose unused advertising real estate as a display for artists’ work, until such time as someone ponies up to lease the original blank canvas.

So what did artist Weist choose to do with the billboard space? Using Apple Garamond font, she put a single word on the billboard: "parbunkells."

Why that word? Because, at that time, the word could not be found on the World Wide Web. Weist found it in a rare book, and just threw the word up there.

So what happened?

Her personal website, which just happened to include that same word, got an increase in traffic.

As her personal website notes, she programmed a lamp in her residence to turn on when her webpage is visited. For her sake, I hope the lamp isn't in her bedroom.

Weist has been interviewed by the New Yorker.

Finally, and most importantly, Julia Weist's name has been mentioned in the Empoprise-BI business blog.

Talk about reach.

Oh, and a lot of businesses really want to see her website traffic analytics.

If you want to perform the experiment yourself, you don't have to go to the rare books library. You can just randomly create a word of your own.

Just don't use tymshft. It's been done.