Six great guerrilla marketing campaigns

November 13, 2007 | By Chris Connolly

"Each year, America spends about $250 billion on marketing and advertising -- more than the entire GDP of Thailand. Too bad most of that money is a complete waste. For an increasingly savvy, TiVo-equipped public, our brains seem to shut down whenever something registers as "advertising." Which means all those marketing creatives at the big ad firms have had no choice but to, well, get more creative.

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1) The Blair Witch Project
Arguably the most important aspect of a successful guerrilla campaign is staying one step ahead of the public. As consumers become more attuned to ad agency efforts, marketers have to figure out how to attack the mob from unexpected angles. The brand standard for catching the public off guard? 1999's The Blair Witch Project. With no stars, no script, and a budget of around $50,000, University of Central Florida Film School pals Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez successfully scrubbed out the line between reality and fiction.

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2) Médecins du MondeNot all guerrilla campaigns are about the money. In fact, one of the cleverest and most altruistic grassroots marketing efforts was pulled off by a group called Médecins du Monde -- an international humanitarian organization devoted to providing care for vulnerable populations around the world.In late 2005, the French branch of the organization staged an extremely effective campaign to draw attention to the plight of the homeless in Paris. Christened the "tent city" initiative, the group distributed some 300 "two-second tents" to destitute Parisians sleeping outdoors. Equipped with the rapid-deploying tents (which didn't require poles or pins), the homeless gathered in small groups of eight to 10 along the Quai d'Austerlitz and the Canal Saint-Martin. The prefab shelter, which bore the Médecins du Monde logo, drew immediate attention to the number of homeless people in the area and provoked such incredible public outrage that the city was forced to act. A rare off-season government session was convened, and officials admitted that Paris' homeless shelters were vastly overcrowded. They immediately announced the allocation of nearly $10 million for emergency housing.

3) Half.com. The thing about Internet domain names is that they're frequently difficult to remember. They have "krayzee" spellings, or "numb3rs" in them, or they're only tangentially related to the products they offer. (What does "fogdog" have to do with sports equipment, anyway?) And in 1999, name recognition was one of the main problems facing half.com, an eBay-esque online marketplace that allows people to sell used items for fixed prices without the hassle of an auction. "There is such a dot-com clutter out there," half.com CEO Joshua Kopelman said at the time. "We wanted to do something innovative to get some visibility in the crowd."

4) Acclaim Entertainment


Nowhere are the semi-criminal aspects of guerrilla marketing more important than in pitching to videogamers. Regular folks might occasionally enjoy being duped by an unusually clever campaign, but gamers seem to suck down daring and deception like a Big Gulp of Mountain Dew. The more the stunts flaunt the law, the more the gaming demographic seems to like them.

The undisputed high-score holder in this renegade arena is Acclaim Entertainment, a plucky little company that began as a one-room outfit in Oyster Bay, New York, and bloomed into a multinational juggernaut. Eschewing artistry in favor of an "all publicity is good publicity" philosophy, Acclaim stirs up the stuffy types -- and then laughs all the way to the bank. One of its bedrock tactics is to offer people money for performing some insane stunt on behalf of its upcoming game. Prior to the release of "Turok: Evolution," for instance, the company offered £500 to the first five U.K. citizens who'd legally change their names to Turok. (Almost 3,000 people tried to claim the prize.) Later, promoting the release of "Shadow Man 2," Acclaim announced it would pay the relatives of the recently deceased to place promotional ads on the headstones of their dearly departed. The company said the promotional fee might "particularly interest poorer families."

5) Vodafone

While some guerrilla campaigns border on art -- baffling consumers with their cocky blend of ingenuity and imagination -- others take a more boorish approach. During the 2002 Bledisloe Cup rugby match, for example, two young men suddenly burst onto the field at a crucial moment and ran across the pitch wearing nothing but the Vodafone logo painted on their backs.

Admittedly, streaking at a rugby match isn't exactly uncommon, but sponsored streaking very much is. Adding to the drama? The fact that the match was held in Telstra Stadium -- Telstra being Vodafone's competitor.

In the end, one of the streakers was fined $3,500 (AUS), and a maelstrom of criticism was directed at Vodafone. However, millions of TV viewers witnessed the event live, and it was covered everywhere from CNN to the front page of the The Times in London. For a company seeking to sell itself as young and brash, such backlash was a ringing endorsement.

6) Obey: Andre The Giant Has A Posse

Most marketing ploys are created to promote a product, but the global rash of stickers, posters, and stencils reading "Andre The Giant Has A Posse" exist only to urge people to question their surroundings. In essence, it's an ad campaign against advertising.

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Source and whole article at: http://articles.cnn.com/2007-11-13/living/guerrilla.marketing_1_guerrilla-big-ad-firms-daniel-myrick?_s=PM:LIVING