For those of you who aren’t familiar with Matt Allen (aka Ice Cream Man) here’s the scoop: dude travels around the country non-stop in a 1969 Chevy step van handing out free ice cream to hipsters at some of the biggest music festivals as well as doling out the goodness to sick kids at hospitals. We’ve shared Astro Pops with him at SXSW and Lollapalooza and he’s truly one of the “good guys” in the indie scene. As of today, Matt and his crew have already handed out 150,000 free treats this year.

But all of this graciousness requires money. It’s not cheap to drive around the states and hand out free shit. So Matt decided to reach out to potential sponsors in a unique way. He created an auction on Ebay where folks could bid on a sponsorship for the rest of ‘08. You would get logo presence on the ice cream truck, promo items, and a ton of other cool shit. In a world of banner blindness and commercial-skipping DVRs, his sponsorship program gives businesses direct interaction with an audience of Gen X & Yers that everyone salivates over.

With the auction supposed to end on Wednesday afternoon, the bids had gotten up to over $1000 bucks by Tuesday night. And that’s when Ebay unexplicably pulled the plug. Here’s the email we got from Matt:

Hi ice cream friends,

At around 10pm last night, while i was enjoying a beer with friends at one of my favorite bars in NY, Maracuja, I got two emails from ebay saying that the Ice Cream Man Sponsorship Auction had been removed. WHAT? And everything was going SO well. We were proud of all the work we had put in to get the word out there. And, it was pretty too.

I’ve posted a news article outlining everything that happened here. I’ve talked with live chat on ebay and also emailed Ebay Trust and Security (who haven’t replied) and talked to a nice lady on the phone but we’re still screwed here and there’s very lil recourse. We put in hundreds of hours on this auction and numerous friends (thanks Jambase, SPIN, Glide Magazine, Muzzle of Bees, and more) were willing to post news bits about it and donate thousands of dollars in ad space and now we’ve got $0 and no real person at ebay to talk to about the issue.

I’ve been a registered ebay user for TEN years with 100% positive feedback and this is how I get treated?. The only thing we can think to do right now is to try to get some press about this until we hear back from ebay. We might just run the auction on icecreamman.com but I’ve gotta leave Brooklyn today to get to Chicago in time to sling cream at the children’s hospital and Pitchfork Fest on Friday.

If we can get our story Dugg by over 200 people we’ll get on the homepage and might be able to get some more press from that. Please digg it and shout to your friends to have them digg it too.

Sorry for the excessive email blasts the last week. All we wanna do is give away ice cream…promise
Matt

Matt has posted an update on the situation HERE complete with emails from Ebay detailing why they cancelled their auction. Once this auction gets back up and running, we’ll let you know ’cause that Detour logo is gonna look sick on the side of that ice cream truck.

– AM