Starting this Friday, a series of ads promoting tourism in Greece are set to begin running on a digital billboards in Times Square. But it’s not an airline, travel company or government agency behind the ads, instead the ads have been financed by a group of ordinary people that include Greeks and people of Greek ancestry who live in other countries around the world.

As anyone who has watched the news over the past few years knows, Greece is undergoing a financial crisis. The group hopes that their contributions can help to promote more people to visit the country where tourism is estimated to account for up to 18 per cent of Greece’s gross domestic product and 20 per cent of its employment

The independent group calling themselves UP Greek Tourism, used grassroots PR and social media to attract 333 people to the crowdfunding site LoudSauce, where they donated a total of $20,352 to the cause. The ad creative features a mosaic of faces transforming into well-known images of Greece. The ad will run four times an hour and is set to run for a total of 30 days. The group decided to use LoudSauce, rather than other crowdfunding sites due to its integrated media buying capabilities.

Crowdfunding is a hot topic this week, with the news that the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to pass the JOBS Act, a bill that will allow small businesses to raise cash over the Internet in exchange for equity stakes.

In an interview with TPM, Yancey Strickler, one of the three co-founders of one of the best-known crowdfunding sites Kickstarter , said that the company is on track to distribute over $150 million to its users’ projects in 2012, edging out the $146 million budget of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts.

LoudSauce and Kickstarter are just two of the dozens of crowdfunding sites, others include:

• Indiegogo: a San Francisco-based site focused on areas such as music, charity, small business and film.
• RocketHub: with a focus on creative projects, the site looks to bring together ‘Fuelers’ (the folks with the money) and ‘Creatives’ (the ones with the ideas)
• CrowdCube: a UK site concentrating on equity for new business and startups