So fashionable,
sucking on a pacifier
Guerrilla campaign slaps stick-ons of pacifiers
By Toni Fitzgerald
Jan 22, 2010
From far away, it doesn't look like anything out of the ordinary. Just one of the many posters that line the streets of New York, this one showing a diverse group of young people wearing winter-themed sweaters from the Gap.
But as you get closer, you realize that it's not an ordinary poster at all. All of the young people have pacifiers in their mouths, bright blue ones with white handles. The pacifiers make the group look like a bunch of babies.
You don't think much of it -- this is New York, after all-- until you come across a poster advertising TLC's "Cake Boss" a few blocks away. There is the pacifier again, stuck in the mouth of the chef.
You go a few more blocks and soon you've seen a half dozen of these posters with the pacifiers. Is it a bizarre new fashion trend?
Hardly.
It's a clever alternative media stunt to promote the web site Iwanttobeababy.com, clothier Egg Baby's micro entertainment site aimed at young parents.
The pacifiers are actually stick-on graphics slapped over the mouths of the characters in the posters.
"We were brainstorming about cheap and effective guerrilla options, and the idea of using other brands' advertising came up," says Marta Ibarrondo, who designed the web site. "[We wanted to] create buzz spending as little as possible."
It was a very cheap campaign, costing just $500 to order the die-cut stickers. The stickers were then affixed to posters on New York City streets.
Some posters were better suited than others.
"It worked best when people were looking straight at the camera," Ibarrondo notes. "Also they needed to be pretty big so that the ratio looked correct."
The pacifiers were applied in late December. Ibarrondo says that she has not heard any complaints from the advertisers whose posters were targeted, including Gap, Crate & Barrel, TLC, NBC and Kenneth Cole.
Still, the idea of using someone else's creative as your palate is a controversial one in the advertising community, with some arguing it's a form of theft.
There's no arguing with the results, though. Ibarrondo says the campaign received mention in more than 100 blogs around the world, and traffic to both I Want to Be a Baby and Egg Baby's main site have soared.
"When people saw the posters with pacifiers on, they Twittered," she says. "I have been approached by two radio stations to do interviews and so far a national newspaper in Canada is doing a story on it, and I just received inquiries from a few newspapers in the U.S."
The campaign worked for two reasons. First, it forced people to do a double-take. You don't expect to see a sophisticated Kenneth Cole model sucking on a pacifier.
Second, the pacifiers had an air of mystery about them that sent people scrambling online to figure out what they were for. That brought more people to the site and more attention to the campaign.
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