The Institute (協会)

The New Guerrilla (or perhaps stealth) Advertising Trend (Metropolis Magazine)

(Recent guerrilla and alternative marketing efforts: WFP’s Rheingold graffiti campaign.Courtesy MFD)

Fellas, Steven Heller writes an interesting piece about the lengths advertisers are willing to go get you to pay attention to them. Like the ad above for Rheingold Beer, many using graffiti. Good stuff. Here is it from Metropolis Magazine:

"A few years ago Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners stenciled New York sidewalks with the line: “From here it looks like you could use some new underwear,” for an intimate apparel company. I don’t remember the brand, but I do know it sold some panties. Last Christmas the “Cheer Pass” campaign for Starbucks, produced in collaboration with Wieden + Ken­nedy, involved affixing red paper cups precariously on dozens of cab roofs. If a Good Samaritan warned the taxi’s passenger about the errant cup before driving off, a free Starbucks gift card was awarded(see picture below).

(Wieden + Kennedy’s “Cheer Pass” campaign for Starbucks. Courtesy Free Car Media)

This is guerrilla (or perhaps stealth) advertising, a term the industry uses to label a breed of “edgy” urban campaign. Known also as “never been done before” (or NBDB) ads, this strategy was co-opted directly from DIY alternative culture and wild posters, and involves the semisubversive planting of messages in venues and on objects ordinarily free of advertising: banana peels, body tattoos, even urinal- dis­infectant pucks.

Today’s newest tactic—which has produced another buzzword (“the most awful of the month,” says Brian Collins, director of Ogilvy’s Brand Innovation Group)—is viral advertising. Usually passed along through blogs and e-mails, it is, according to Collins, “anything that inspires and supports word-of-mouth stories about a brand.” He points to last year’s Dove “Evolution of Beauty” campaign as an overnight viral sensation when more than a million people watched a time-elapsed video of a model made gorgeous on YouTube. “It became such a phenomenon. The video got front-page news coverage and was on The View,” Collins says. “It broke without traditional media in less than a week.”

Alternative campaigns like these—as well as ambient ads, which involve legally and illegally commandeering novel public spaces—have been so successful that some agencies and marketing firms are devoted exclusively to colonizing urban sites and the Internet."

Read the rest of the article here.

Hey, anybody ever had Rheingold Beer? Thoughts on graffiti advertising?

Posted by anthony at April 5, 2007 09:09 AM | TrackBack