It’s time for another blast from the past! Despite Loquax’s 13 years online, we’ve not done much in the way of publicity. We turned down two TV interviews (one because it was for 6am and the other because Jason was about to go on holiday). We’ve only done one radio interview (and that story is for another time) and newspaper articles about the people behind Loquax have been few and far between.
That’s actually not a bad thing. Myself and Kirsty never wanted to be the “stars” of the site. The celebrity comping thing never appealed and our aim was that Loquax and it’s users, regardless of how much they won, should be the main focus.
15 Minutes Of Fame
However, that’s not to say we’ve not courted “15 minutes of fame”. A few months after our Readers’ Choice Award a couple of comping articles appeared in the press. We’d been promoting competitions on South West News and a journalist, as a thank you, offered to do a few articles for us. No one told us it required photos and besides we were young etc… This article appeared in The Daily Star in May 2000. First off, as tough as the site can be to run some days, it’s not usual for Loquax desks to be covered in alcohol. Secondly there’s a few exaggerations in the article – take the numbers with a pinch of salt. “Dotcom millionaire”? This time next year Rodney!
When We Used To Win Stuff
The great thing about the article is that it’s from a time when we did enter competitions – and we won stuff. Some people forget (or have never realised) that Loquax was originally started by compers for compers. We actually did win two holidays to Barbados, a trip to Ibiza (long forgotten about as we passed the prize on), £1000 (remember Freemoney.fm?), mountain bikes, a Vespa Scooter, a HiFi, a lawnmower (in-laws still have this) and countless Bertie Basset tshirts.
It’s Good Publicity
In some ways it’s nice to do these kind of articles – after all it’s good publicity for Loquax – but on the other hand it can be quite strange seeing yourself in print in this way. It’d be a surprise to do anything like this again though (so at least we can say we did it). When it comes to comping articles these days, journalists tend to like featuring people who are winning stuff and have you notice, that they also rarely feature guys. Judging my that haircut above, that’s probably a good thing. By the way, the case of wine on show was a prize – and it wasn’t very nice at 10am in the morning!