Coming home from work each day, he sprayed his house with pesticide and carefully plucked dead mosquitoes from sheets laid on the floor. Some of Manit's competitors were less methodical. Supaporn Linnon, an unemployed 23-year old simply filled a glass jar with the squashed remains of mosquitoes she swatted by hand. Johnson hopes its bug hunt - conducted nationwide - will link its brands to good health and hygiene and build market share for its pesticide products, including Raid, a household bug spray. "We haven't done this to double the size of the market tomorrow," says Johnson Managing Director Maurizio Stampinato. "It's something we've done to increase our market in the long term and link our brand to something that is good for people." Johnson kicked off its campaign in July. Teaming up with local advertising company Direct Response (Thailand), a subsidiary of US advertising firm FCB Worldwide, Johnson ran advertisements in the form of mock police "wanted" notices, complete with cartoon criminal bugs.

Particularly eyecatching for recession-weary Thais, the ads promised: "Raid takes dead bugs and pays one baht (2.3 US cents) for each". Working on the assumption that children influence their parents, Johnson and Direct Response went further. with the help of Thailand's health ministry, they sent performers dressed up as mosquitoes and roaches into 70 schools in 30 provinces to promote awareness of insect-spread diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. The cash-for-bugs claim was a tad exaggerated: Johnson didn't actually pay a bounty of one baht per insect. Instead, the company staged a series of auctions in which contenders could use their dead-bug hoard - nominally valued at one baht a corpse - to bid for consumer goods ranging from gold necklaces to radios and TVs.

Even so, nobody at Johnson or Direct Response expected the buzz the campaign set off among Thais struggling with the aftermath of a 1997-98 recession that wiped out hundreds of thousands of jobs. Johnson executives say they initially expected people might show up with bags of bugs roughly equivalent to the price of a TV. But at one auction in the northern city of Chiang Mai, one amateur exterminator won a competition for a 14-inch TV valued at about 5,000 baht with a stunning bid of 1.6 million mosquitoes.

To cope, Johnson's tally takers had to develop a short cut: They counted each contestant's first 50,000 bug bodies, weighed that sample, and weighed the contestant's remaining pile and multiplied.

"I thought people would turn up with a few hundred corpses each," says one Direct Response employee monitoring the counting ahead of the Bangkok auction. "I was very much surprised when one man turned up with 20,000 dead bugs, I was even more surprised and shocked when someone arrived with 1.6 million."

Direct Response's general manager Tipapan Viriyawatana, calls the campaign "a huge success." Competitors stomped, slapped and sprayed a total of 5,504,224 mosquitoes, she says. In the process, Johnson - thanks to local media interest - wound up with about eight times as much publicity as it paid for, Ms Tipapan estimates.

So is Johnson selling more Raid? It is too soon to tell, but the feedback from the health ministry and consumers has been "very positive," Mr Stampinato says. Johnson executives are already planning another campaign for next year.

That's just as well for Mr Manit, the farmer who was hoping to bag a TV. His impressive haul of 40,000 mosquitoes was trumped by another bidder with a bucketful of 600,000 insects.

-- (Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed to this article)