Guerrilla Marketing 2010

Guerrilla marketing used to be easy to define. If a New Yorker happened to notice a Jeep Grand Cherokee driving up the side of a building near Madison Square Garden and stopped to watch, it was pretty obvious he'd been snared by a guerrilla stunt. Or if Londoners went down to the Tube and found a mock living room of Ikea furniture instead of government-issue concrete seating, here again the pedestrian could feel the hook pulling at his lip. But, of course, the obit has been written for the analog days. Budgets are tight, and the demand for immediate splash is enormous. The result of these realities has coalesced in the past year or so—guerrilla stunts with a decidedly social media bent.But, as with most marketing that's been bullied into the digital space, there's no playbook to follow, and the sidewalk is strewn with evidence of how brands are feeling their way. Here's how the early guerrilla categories are shaking out. Some start with the standard street stunt, post a vid on YouTube, then pray it goes viral (as Coke did with its rigged-up "Happiness Machine" this past summer). Others take it a step further by installing something provocative, asking consumers to participate in the gambit, then share their contributions online. That's what Panasonic did when it left a 9-foot-tall pigeon in a London park as a way of encouraging people to take their own distorted perspective photos. Then there are brands that rely solely on a Web audience, not a live one, for all the buzz, such as the ballsy move by Euro carrier Germanwings, which sent a PR-sabotage group aboard a rival airline.The guerrilla-meets-digital permutations are endless, but their very proliferation proves that the "street" in street-level marketing is no longer just the asphalt variety. "I've noticed in the last two years that there's a bigger and bigger trend toward creating events that have social media hooks to them," says Sam Ewen, president of New York-based guerrilla marketing firm Interference, Inc.Breaking through the media clutter, however, is not any easier. YouTube has become so clogged with videos, Ewen says, that seriously funny street marketing that might have easily snared 100,000 views a year ago is now lucky to get 1,500. What about relying on Twitter for buzz? Same problem: Dilution. "If I have 10,000 Twitter followers, and they're following 800 people, by the time they check in, my tweet's so far down they'll never see it."Digital's influence on guerrilla has even compelled some marketers to get out of the stunts entirely and let the masses do it—a social-to-offline trend that starts with a crowd instead of hoping to draw one. "The best engagements that I see," observes David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, "are when the audience is involved and participating while they are being entertained."Maybe so, but those schemes can also be the ones that backfire the loudest. Of course, even the biggest guerrilla-gone-wrong tales won't be enough to deter brands from swaggering into this new realm. To follow, a number who have—some with terrific results, others with...Well, read on.THE TARGET KALEIDOSCOPENever mind that unpleasant defection of Isaac Mizrahi two years back. Target has managed to prove that hiring high-end designers to do midrange collections has raised both its sales and its profile. But Tarjay's efforts to tie its brand name to affordable luxe fashion have gone further still—specifically, to New York's Fashion Week this past summer. Seeking to turn some beautiful heads, the retailer rented the too-cool-for-you Standard Hotel—as in, the whole hotel. Techies outfitted 155 exterior rooms with banks of LEDs. On August 18, when the sun went down, the lights went up. Throwing open the rooms' white curtains, 66 dancers clad in day-glo skeleton suits undulated to a score by DJ Sam Spiegel while the LEDs blazed through a panoply of color combos—a Close Encounters-like light show reinterpreted for Gen Y eyeballs.Had Target tried this sort of thing a few years ago, it might have settled for street appeal alone. Instead, it installed bleachers on Little West 12th St. (crowd estimates ranged from 3,000-5,000), agency Mother New York invited celebs like Gossip Girl heartthrob Penn Badgley to spark things up, and the event was Webcast, taped and shot for maximum media and social media pickup. "The longtail of an event like this is crucial—so much so that sometimes we pay to shoot the assets ourselves even if our client partner just wants the live delivery," says Mother New York partner and creative chief Tom Webster. "Target got massive hits online as well as through traditional media outlets."Brand: TargetAgency: Mother New York (concept); The Bionic League (lights); Olson (Web video/social media)Objective: Promote the 2010 fall and holiday season apparel lines and generally act like a big player during Fashion WeekPayoff: 3,000 people on street level; 12.6 million Google hits from the eventM.S.I. CHICAGO'S 'MONTH AT THE MUSEUM'Museums are always looking to boost awareness and patronage, usually without much money to do either. So a social, crowd-sourced guerrilla campaign can make sound economic sense—assuming the institution is willing to take a risk. This past July, Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, seeking to juice up its staid image and put on a fresh public face, decided that it was.Baiting digitally savvy members of the public, the 77-year-old establishment, working with its agency, Hoffman York, promised the chance to spend a "Month at the Museum"—as in, actually living there in a hotel-style room complete with meals. The winner would become a tweeting, Facebooking, YouTubing, Flickering human exhibit (and get $10K for the effort). "We were thinking of this person as an ambassador," says museum CMO Rob Gallas, "a mirror that will reflect all of the energy and things that go on here."While expecting maybe 150 to 200 entries—which had to include essays and videos—Gallas was inundated with more than 1,500 applications worldwide. The program has landed in more than 400 blogs, almost doubled the Facebook fan base and has drawn in local TV and radio, along with ABC's Good Morning America and other national shows. "It's been hotter than the Titanic or the Harry Potter exhibits," Gallas adds.The winner (with 20,000 votes via online balloting) was a 24-year-old teacher from the North Side—who's just moved in as we go to press. She's already made it clear that she plans to spend one night inside the museum's WWII-era German submarine. Brand: The Chicago Museum of Science and IndustryAgency: Hoffman York, ChicagoObjective: Fetch younger, Web-savvy fans for this 77-year-old museumPayoff (So far): Local and national TV traditional media exposure; "record" traffic to Web siteTHE DR PEPPER STATUS TAKEOVERIf you recall that stunt from 2007 in which agency Interference stuck little boxes with flashing lights under bridges in Boston, causing the cops to put the whole city under a terrorism lockdown, you remember that guerrilla marketing can get tons of attention—including the scary kind. Play the game with social media and that truism goes even further.In a bid to boost the social profile of Dr Pepper in the U.K., parent Coca-Cola cooked up the idea of taking over Facebook users' status updates and posting embarrassing messages generated at random via a Dr Pepper Status Takeover widget for a chance to win a £1,000 weekly prize. The let-it-rip idea was pure guerrilla, as were the embarrassing updates (e.g., "Never heard of it described as 'cute' before"). The contest's tagline: "What's the worst that could happen?"Well, when you post updates like "I watched 2 girls one cup and felt hungry afterwards," how about a disaster? When a parent in Glasgow spotted that on her 14-year-old daughter's Facebook page, it was all over. Coke pulled the campaign, apologized, then fired agency LMFM, London.The incident is a textbook example of what happens when an old-guard brand enters the unpredictable fray of social media. Funny thing is, from a pure publicity perspective, the campaign was massive. The mistake was more interesting than the original concept and was garnering more buzz. It is said that all press and buzz is good. Dr Pepper likely disagrees.Brand: Dr PepperAgency: LMFM, LondonObjective: To boost Facebook fan base of Dr Pepper in U.K.Payoff: 160,000 sign-ups, lots of laughs, one considerable PR snafuPANASONIC '8X LIFE'London's parks, like most city parks, are full of pigeons—and those hardly constitute a photo-op. But what if the pigeon was, say, 9 feet tall? Now, there's a shot for the old Facebook page.Such was the reasoning behind Panasonic's "8X Life" guerrilla campaign—and it turned out to be pretty good reasoning, too. Earlier this year, the Japanese electronics company was looking for buzz for the launch of its new Lumix ZX1 camera, which featured an optical zoom lens capable of rendering anything eight times normal life size. Agencies Jack and AKQA, London, hatched the idea of distributing sculptures—a pigeon, a traffic cone, a coffee cup, etc.—around London, Edinburgh and four other U.K. cities. The catch was that each object was gargantuan. The guerrilla installations got people talking, but it was the contest inviting people to distort everyday objects with the camera's zoom lens, then post them on a special Facebook page, that generated most of the attention. The winning shot (r., bottom) snared a trip to the Vancouver Winter Olympics. "This young audience in the U.K. wants to be challenged, entertained and participate," says Panasonic U.K. digital communications manager Gaele Lalahy. "It gave us a quirky angle to talk to the audience while being relevant to the photo culture and the product."The biggest image of all, however, were the media impressions. According to Panasonic, the effort reached more than 20 million people. By summer's end, the Lumix ZX1 had grabbed the lead market share in the U.K. Snap. Brand: Panasonic U.K.Agency: AKQA London, JackObjective: Promote the Lumix ZX1 zoom camera lensPayoff: 20 million media impressions, including coverage in 23 print publications and 112 Web sites, blogs and social networksHEINEKEN'S 'WALK-IN FRIDGE'You can tell a lot about people by what they throw out in the trash. That forensic truism formed the basis for a reverse-guerrilla stunt pulled off in the Netherlands by Heineken earlier this year.TBWA/Neboko first released an online video called "Walk-In Fridge." It had no dialogue but showed a group of girlfriends at a housewarming party jumping up and down and shrieking with glee as they see the hostess' new walk-in wardrobe closet. In another room, there's a group of guys having their own whoop—over a walk-in refrigerator lined with shelves and shelves of ice-cold Heineken lager. To date, the video has racked up 4.5 million views on the Web. That's a solid ROI. But Heineken wasn't finished.Fast-forward to a scene repeated all over Amsterdam: people on the tram doing a double take as they notice huge cardboard boxes labeled "Walk-In Fridge" dumped out with the trash at the curbside—complete with young men trying to maneuver the unwieldy cartons through narrow doorways. Usually, a street stunt kicks off a viral video; in this case, the brand inverted the order. The concept straddled the line of believability. Were walk-in fridges actually for sale? Could that video have been... real?The viral tail grew longer still. TBWA built a real walk-in fridge it took to beer festivals, allowing groups of friends to mimic the ad and upload it to YouTube (postings now run to the hundreds). The agency also created a longer-form online video showing guys installing a walk-in fridge in an apartment, with the result showing the box extending outside the outer wall of the building with no visible means of support—even as the guys stand inside, jumping up and down. Brand: HeinekenAgency: TBWA/NebokoObjective: Boost already popular viral video with old-fashioned street theater Payoff: Some 4.5 million YouTube hits for original vid; hundreds of imitator postingsCOKE'S 'HAPPINESS MACHINE'The students at St. John's University in Queens, N.Y., drink a lot of Coke. But this past January, feeding a buck into the cafeteria vending machine produced a lot more than a bottle of soda.In terms of execution, Coke's "Happiness Machine" was textbook guerrilla marketing. Agency Definition 6 installed a specially rigged vending machine over a holiday when nobody was around. The machine's back connected to a storeroom big enough for the people and props necessary for the stunt. Meanwhile, techies set up tiny video cameras around the room to capture the responses. "It looked like an ordinary machine," relates Coke's senior manager of marketing A.J. Brustein. "Nobody suspected anything."Not at first, anyway. Students who fed dollars into the machine initially walked away with ordinary Cokes. But the next bill drops produced more than the kids bargained for, including a bouquet of sunflowers, a doggie balloon and even a piping-hot pepperoni pizza. The response was much as you'd expect: nervous laughter, screams, gaping stares, then a crowd. The Web cams caught it all—then routed the footage onto YouTube. To date, the video has racked up 2.8 million hits.Actually, the impact was bigger than that. Coke also used the YouTube video as a 30-second TV spot, which ran in the U.S. and overseas. Total media impressions hit 200 million. Not a bad ROI for the cost of a vending machine and some props. "We had a limited budget and a limited amount of time," Brustein says. "We were very happy with the results." Brand: Coca-ColaAgency: Definition 6Objective: Build online following for Coke with the teen demographic with a hoax and a Web video to followPayoff: 2.8 million hits on YouTube; 200 million media impressions overallMCDONALD'S 'CATCH THE GOODIES'Just what lengths are consumers willing to go to get a free order of McDonald's fries that only costs around a buck to start with? Maybe the better question is: Are camera-phone-wielding pedestrians with nothing better to do willing to spend 30 seconds to get a free sundae?As it turned out, yes—sort of. But first, the gambit. Earlier this year, a Stockholm McDonald's hired DDB Stockholm to create a videogame in which menu items bounced across a huge outdoor digital billboard downtown. The rules: Capture a menu item on your camera phone, bring it into the restaurant and get that item for free.Maybe it's because videogames (including ones on smartphones) already permeate people's lives, but only about 300 people decided to try. That's not great by any metric, but DDB Stockholm's social media director Michael Bugaj hastens to add that the game created buzz beyond the city square—which was the point of running more than the usual billboard ad. "The sign itself, and perhaps the freshness of this approach to interaction," he says, "became the talk of the town."If only the talk made a difference in the register drawer. Brand: McDonald's SwedenAgency: DDB StockholmObjective: Jump-start sales of menu items via digital gamingPayoff: 300+ customers, plus undetermined social media sharingGERMANWINGS' 'PLANEMOB'One afternoon this past April, somewhere over Europe, passengers crammed into coach seats on a Ryanair flight were complaining. "I hate this 'choose your seat' thing!" barked one. After another joked about paying a surcharge to use the lavatory, a third blurted: "Look out the window; at least that's free!"It could have been any flight anywhere—but there was a catch to it. The bitching was going on via cardboard "thought bubble" signs held aloft by an undercover team from a rival carrier—while a co-conspirator filmed it all from the back row. "Next time," read the last bubble, "let's just fly Germanwings."Guerrilla marketing at 30,000 feet is likely a first—but since only a few people were going to witness this spectacle (carried out via agency Lukas Lindemann Rosinski), the social media component–the YouTube vid "Planemob," in this case—was essential. "What made this work perfectly for YouTube is that the whole thing was naughty to do," says London-based social media consultant Dennis Belmont. "Yet [it] tapped into an angst that all flyers seem to have about being screwed by the airline."While the video racked up 332,000 hits-a respectable, if not exactly stratospheric, number—the ROI compared well to the up-front spending. As LLR creative chief Arno Lindemann later said publicly: "I hate to admit it sometimes, but it seems like the best ideas cost very little to produce." Brand: GermanwingsAgency: Lukas Lindemann RosinskiObjective: Generate awareness of Germanwings' cheap airfares via viral contentPayoff: 332,000 YouTube views

Brand Marketing

Guerrilla Marketing 2010

Robert Klara

David Kiley

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Robert Klara

David Kiley