In Berlin, a set of guerrilla marketing tactics were noticed recently. At the annual Awards show of the Art Directors Club last week, a real life ram promoted Future:headz, a Munich-based agency whose tagline is ‘Bock auf Neues’, a take on the English expression ‘going for new stuff’. The key to understanding the campaign though, is the fact that ‘bock’ translates to ‘ram’ in English.

Second, to focus attention on intelligent advertising work and not just awards, Future:headz installed two mannequins in various (ahem!) sexual positions to convey the message ‘make love not awards’. That was bound to attract attention!

And finally, [...]

Taking a page from their customer friendly food service model, Burger King recently took “Have It Your Way” into the realms of D.I.Y. fashion.  A collaboration between 5 designers and artists tasked with reinterpreting elements of Burger King’s icons and logos culminated at an event held in Chicago on October 24th.  The gathering invited participants to take part in the studio creation process by silk-screening the final designs onto their own clothing in any combination they chose.  Essentially, a clever form of marketing that allowed Burger King to subvert their own image, while at the same time maintaining recognizable aspects [...]

Guerrilla marketing is now old news, it seems any corporate entity can hire a team of creative youngsters and plaster their image all over town. If you have an innovative approach for venues, you can find a marketing opportunity anywhere. Take the recipe directory called Recipe8, they found a free spot to publicize their URL in an unlikely place full of traffic, BugMeNot. The hugely popular resource for bypassing free login credentials has now become a soap box for free advertising. By putting their URL as a bogus login utilized for the New York Times, Recipe8 [...]

The growth and cost-effectiveness of “Ambush Marketing” has driven offical sponsors of the Olympics to push for a ban.  Luckily for them, China has a well established system for clamping down on all things lacking government approval.  China has banned athletes from bringing their own drinks to events and will take over all prominent advertising locations, allowing only promotional material carrying official sponsorship.
The Economist reports:
Ambush marketers have replaced hooligans as the villains of sporting events, because they undermine official sponsors, which are the main source of revenue in some sports. The stakes are highest at the Olympics. This year 12 [...]

I’ve seen this advertised on the London Underground and the London train network and because of the semi-subversive creative and lack of a brand was fairly curious. However, the fact that they were advertising at all made me skeptical of the motives for the campaign.
If you follow this link then it appears that my skepticism was well founded as the Information Revolution is just a campaign for the search engine Ask. As a consumer I felt pretty annoyed that a huge company had tried to dupe me, as an advertising professional I felt disappointed that a company would try and [...]

British planner Beeker writes about a campaign by the Guardian newspaper that her friend Matt has left on his bike. She says:
“And he came home very impressed with this marketing from the Guardian for their Cycling Guide last weekend. It’s been on his bike ever since.”
More: beeker ideas

Probably the most topical of the talks next Tuesday will be on the subject of guerrilla and outdoor marketing and where to draw the line between smart idea and urban spam. Rob Schaltenbrand who previously worked as Engagement Director at Converse will probe the subject with a number of professionals whose companies work touches upon the subject: Floyd Hayes of Cunning, Kacy Coll of Naked, Darren Paul of the Night Agency and Drew Neisser of Renegade.
‘Urban Spam or Smart Idea’ is an essential talk on one of the most important issues facing the advertising and marketing industry.
Tickets & Info: [...]

There’s an interesting campaign being run by the Salvation Army in Brazil that uses recycled cardboard and grocery bags that have been found on the street. On the boxes are printed layout-designs to show how the pieces are used.
More at: Wooster Collective

Since the Boston urban spam incident last week, there has been much discussion in the blogosphere about the campaign. A couple of blog posts really stood out.
Seth Godin made us think back to the concept of challenger brands
More than ten years ago, I co-wrote four of the Guerrilla Marketing books. At the time, Jay Levinson and I were focused at helping small businesses break out of the helpless rut of leaving advertising to the big guys. There were plenty of niches where smaller organizations could really thrive without becoming pariahs in their community.
It hasn’t taken long for the game to [...]

Here’s a nice idea that Anomaly sent us: it’s an ad that hijacks other ads. In this version in Times Square the Sports Illustrated supermodel in the ad above drinks from the bottle of Dasani in the ad below through a well placed giant straw. Click image to enlarge.
Update: Ah, we just worked out that there’s a partnership between Dasani & Sports Illustrated. Check out the site cravingmore.com.
Clever, no?

There’s been a lot of hoo-ha over the last 24 hours over the fact that a guerrilla marketing campaign for TV Show TV Hunger Force where an LED icon was thrown over a wire and caused a power-cut. The bomb squad were also called.
Now, there are two camps here: the oh look how the police over reacted camp (led by Boing Boing) and the maybe they pushed it too far camp (led by Floyd Hayes). Boing Boing don’t seem to do much for a living) seem content to ridicule the Boston police:
Ashamed of their own foolish overreaction to finding some [...]

Here’s an interesting spot by Floyd Hayes. Munich agency Serviceplan advertised cheap vacations by writing the price on cars’ snowed up windscreens.

Interesting sponsorship of street art seen on the top of Smith Street in Brooklyn recently. Seems like Coke and the MTA have supported an initiative by the ‘Tats Cru‘ to recreate kids paintings to brighten up the area.

The NY Times has a lengthy article criticizing the advertising industry for plastering any space available to hit us with a commercial message. The quote by John McNeil of McCann really demonstrates why this is a growing issue: the people, like John, who conduct this sort of activity think that there work is appreciated by the public and it’s other ad agencies’ work that is blighting the modern urban landscape.

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