No Rules in a New Ad World
Telegraph Herald’s Business Times, 2009. An article on the viability of guerilla marketing in today’s advertising space.
It’s a shimmery spring afternoon, and a crowd has decided to gather around a garbage can like a pack of vagrants. Are they huddling for warmth? Maybe talking to a not-so-friendly Sesame Street character? No, they’ve been drawn to the “World’s Deepest Bin,” a trash receptacle that makes the whistle of a Looney Tunes free fall whenever trash is disposed of.
What if you make the mundane fun? It’s a question Volkswagen posed with The Fun Theory, a series of social experiments where everyday activities are refreshed with a little engineering and a whole lot of clever. Stairs next to an escalator were turned into ivories that could be tickled with your feet. A bottle recycling unit was turned into a whack-a-mole-style arcade game. Not only did people love it, they probably told a whole lot of others about their experience. What does it have to do with automobiles? Not much, but you can bet the Volkswagen brand and their great experience coalesced.
This is guerrilla marketing, a platform outside typical advertising channels to reach customers and build brand awareness. It is driven by surprising someone with a clever, illuminating or altruistic message. Usually, this means without the qualifier of expectation. It’s not a pitch, it’s establishing your brand as human. And humans like other humans, but advertising ones – well, not so much.
That’s never been truer in today’s media space, where advertising is categorically avoided on principle alone. By operating outside the polluted advertising environment, a connection can be made that may have been impossible otherwise.
With that said, guerrilla marketing doesn’t operate like traditional advertising. This often leads to reluctance and a perception of it being risky or overly difficult.
And it’s true. Guerrilla campaigns don’t blossom overnight. They take time to organically develop and build brand ambassadors who can’t wait to tell their friends about a staircase transformed into a human-sized piano. In guerrilla marketing, the person is in on the secret. There is no Nielsen metric. There is no “Okay, you’ve seen it, so what did you think?” But with a focus on the most powerful form of advertising, word of mouth, it can easily be a game changer.
Guerrilla marketing came to into its own in the 1980s, where small companies sought a way to have equal footing in a land inhabited by multi-million dollar giants. The answer came as the name would imply: if you’re losing the game, don’t play by the rules.
That meant going out into the community in a true bandana-over-the-face fashion, with street art and product giveaways and anything else that could generate buzz outside the traditional (and traditionally expensive) methods of advertising. It also meant subversion, with attractive people paid to hawk products under the guise of local bar patron or curious window shopper. This type of advertising did what the big guys couldn’t: establish a personal connection while having them believe they weren’t being advertised to.
It wasn’t long before conglomerates caught onto guerrilla marketing, backing it with huge marketing dollars and distorting it from its original definition. Guerrilla marketing displays became more ostentatious and certainly beyond cheap. But at its heart, guerrilla marketing still retains a DIY attitude where ingenuity takes precedence over payout. And as a medium that relies on staying fresh and innovative, there’s no looking back once something’s been overdone. It becomes a battle of wits, not bucks.
Guerrilla marketing isn’t viral marketing, yet a guerrilla campaign can take the form of a viral one. It’s objective is to grab attention and generate buzz for the people who experience it; if it just so happens to be interesting enough to pass along, so be it. Viral marketing is planting a seed and hoping it grows. Guerrilla marketing is handing out flowers.
Any guerrilla marketing effort must support your overarching advertising message. That means not being shocking or deceptive for the sake of doing so. When anti-smoking campaign TheTruth.com launched a series of jarring public spectacles (with subsequent TV ads), it went to the root of its message: Smoking kills, so don’t smoke. When online casino GoldenPalace.com had a shirtless man in a tutu jump into the Olympic pool at the 2004 Athens games, it spoke little of gambling. It did lead to the ballerina impersonator spending several months in a Greek prison, however. No word on if they kept him in the tutu during his stay.
As can be gleaned from the Sugar Plum Fairy, if a guerrilla campaign is mishandled, bad word of mouth happens. And bad worth of mouth spreads so quickly it could make H1N1 blush. Fallback is a factor in any campaign, and should be accounted for. With great power comes great responsibility, as they say.
Even if you do find a message on point, it doesn’t mean a guerrilla campaign is right for you. It requires a certain level of dedication and follow-through. You also need to be able to back up the strutting, else be seen as all feathers and no flesh. If you’re unable or unwilling to meet either of these criteria, traditional media it is.
But know this: There is no substitute for an excited neighbor beaming about a spectacle you have created. And there is no tool that can communicate the message of your product or service like guerrilla marketing can.
Everyone enjoys being surprised during the mundane of the day-to-day and given a reason to think or smile. Sometimes, as it turns out, that means gathering around a whistling trash can to experience the joy of garbage disposal. Who knew? 
