By Michael Brechtel
When Jay Conrad Levinson first wrote Guerilla Marketing, he was looking to help small businesses be smarter with their marketing spending. Affordability was key, and although guerilla can be synonymous with sexy and subversive, he talked a lot about profit margins and direct mail. Somewhere from there to here, creative advertisers stole his term. The “guerilla” isn’t about whether it’s on the street or on a billboard, the guerilla is about the intent of the advertiser, and whether the audience reads that intent as credible or false.
Although Levinson coined the term in the ‘70s, guerilla marketing finds its true roots in the stunts of publicity hogs like Thomas Edison. Seriously, watch the “electrocuting an elephant” video on YouTube. This was staged by Edison to show the danger of Nikola Tesla’s AC technology, a competitor to Edison’s DC technology. Warning: I found it kind of disturbing, as I expect you will.
More than a hundred years after Edison electrocuted Topsy, a bomb squad in Boston detonated a Lite-Brite as the result of another interesting marketing stunt. To promote a movie based on a late night cartoon, the people behind the movie hired a couple of performance artists to place Lite-Brites featuring characters from the show around the city (as well as in other major U.S. cities). Accompanying the displays were countdown timers – never a good idea in post-9/11 U.S.A. A public-transit employee called in the cavalry and a $5 Lite-Brite shut down Boston for a couple of hours.
The Boston performance artists were released on bail, charged with “placing a hoax device in a way that results in panic” (seriously) and “disorderly conduct,” and just to hammer home the fact that this was in fact guerilla, a network VP was let go. Although this campaign was relatively inexpensive for a major network, it was unique in every way and a crazy PR machine. Many people would question whether it was a success. I’d say yes – for a couple of reasons.
This was a risky, national campaign. And although it got some bad press in Boston, it got a lot of attention through the magic of buzz. And despite everything, the campaign was perfect for the late night, risqué cartoon it was promoting. In this case, the medium really represented the ethos of the product. A lot of people disagree with me on this – but I won’t judge them for being wrong.
Edmonton boy and media visionary Marshall McLuhan’s concept of “The medium is the message” is relevant here: guerilla marketing challenges norms, and possibly legal conventions. Making an ad is easy – taking risks in order to entertain your audience is not. Guerilla marketing’s ability to surprise, and when done well, entertain, shows that an advertiser is putting some effort into connecting with its audience, rather than blowing more money on another ugly magazine ad. As long as it doesn’t feel like bullshit to the audience, it can be marketing gold.
Speaking of bullshit – Sony’s 2005 graffiti campaign to promote its PSP was so clearly commercial that people saw right through it. There was no natural link between the image they had of Sony as a massive money machine and the idea of graffiti as a subversive street-level art form. Turns out stealing cachet is much different than creating it.
In the same way that Sony borrowed graffiti’s cachet, Mr. Levinson “borrowed” the cachet associated with guerilla warfare. And it worked. It helped him move 20 million copies that wouldn’t have sold if he called it something more appropriate, like “frugal and profit-focused marketing for small businesses.” He made a smart move, but I think that the real guerilla marketers have since laid claim to the term, and rightly so. The new guerilla marketer is cost-sensitive, likes to break as many rules as it can get away with, and relies on creativity and buzz. It’s choosing to entertain their audience, rather than simply sell to them. Just, no more electrocuting elephants, OK?
Next time – A multimedia exploration of some of the best and worst examples of guerilla marketing.
Category: Articles
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