How to spend your marketing and ad budget

I've worked for companies that spent their entire ad and marketing budget on making their existing users deliriously happy. Let's say your marketing and/or ad budget doesn't have the same legs it used to, or that you've just decided to make a change. Or maybe you don't even have a marketing budget. Is there something you can do that might be more creative and, in many cases today, at least--if not more--effective?

These are off the top of my head and my usual disclaimers apply (doesn't work for everything, etc.), and I hope others will add better ideas.

The Sarah McLachlan music video for World on Fire puts a different spin on alternative uses for promotional budgets—they took nearly all of the $150,000 production budget for the music video and spent it on other things. I'm sure you've all seen it by now, but here are a few sample screens that come on (in between a few home-movie quality shots of Sarah playing her guitar):

Bonus: by putting the information into the video, they're also teaching fans/users the true costs of both the production of the video and things like the cost of educating a girl in Afghanistan.

Most of my suggestions aren't nearly as "worthy" as what they did with the World On Fire budget, but to a real user... having a better experience using the product or better yet--getting to the kick ass threshold more quickly--is still a pretty damn worthy cause.

And hey -- if you can help them get laid (by creating/supporting user groups and online communities where people often find meaningful and lasting relationships), then you've got something more powerful than all the "twins" ads money can buy. ; )

Please, add your ideas.

[Relevant links: Heifer International, World Changing, and Gaping Void)]