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of guerilla marketing
Sam Ewen: It's about connecting with people
By Gabriel Spitzer
Sam Ewen is chief executive officer of Interference, a new New York agency that traffics exclusively in guerilla marketing. Before founding Interference, Ewen had been president of Eisnor Interactive where, among his other exploits, he helped convince a small town in Oregon to rename itself "Half.com, Ore." Now Interference, which is in a strategic partnership with New York agency Merkley, Newman, Hardy & Partners, is creating innovative, often mischievous campaigns for the likes of New York Magazine, Audible.com, Nickelodeon and Motts juices, among others. Ewen talks with Media Life about the philosophy of guerilla marketing, consumers versus demographics, and run-ins with the law.
How do you, personally, define guerilla marketing?
I define guerilla marketing as alternatives to traditional media tactics that are high impact but also very eye-level with the consumer, very grassroots and in-the-streets.
With the invasion of so many different media, it’s become more and more apparent that you need to make individual connections with people, treating them not as demographics, but as who they are, what they do, where they are.
Guerilla marketing allows you to talk to people in that voice.
Does it work on the consumer in completely different ways than traditional advertising?
I think so.
TV, for example, is a very passive medium, but I think an impression is still being made on the consumer.
What guerilla marketing allows you to do is to think differently about how you’re going to make an impression.
It’s very psychographic. Take me—I’m 32 years old. I fall into a very distinct demographic. But if you were to target me based on that demographic, you wouldn’t sell very many products to me. My interests are very varied; I like everything from Johnny Cash to hip-hop.
I snowboard, but I also read two books a month. And the TV shows I watch may be anything from A&E Biography to MTV. If you’re looking at me from that point of view, you need to talk to me in a very different way than what my demographic profile says.
When you do that, you often come out with things that are unique and attention-getting that generate word-of-mouth and press.
The kind of feedback you get from guerilla marketing is not what you often get from a TV commercial; things like how cool, I never knew you guys existed, I’m surprised that you’re here.
To me, those kinds of things mean you’re getting through.
I saw a statistic the other day that says the average person sees 17,000 beverage ad impressions a month.
Some of our campaigns have involved going out to the beach on a 90-degree day and giving someone a cold beverage.
When we do that, the person is instantly going to recognize and relate to that campaign. You can’t really do advertising that affects people in that same way.
What are some of the more memorable stunts you’ve been involved with?
From my days at Eisnor, we were involved in everything from when Half.com renamed a town in Oregon, to About.com’s name relaunch.
For that we had 100 people dressed in these very ethereal white outfits every day for a month in three markets, with this very strange message: "Hello, is there anybody out there?"
That was it, it was a teaser campaign.
We did a guerilla telemarketing campaign for them where we hired a telemarketing company to call 10,000 people in the entertainment, media and internet industries at 3 a.m. at their businesses, so that when they got there in the morning, they’d have these very strange messages, just a woman’s voice saying, "Hello, is there anybody out there?"
For TheStreet.com we dressed up people as chauffeurs with signs that said "Waiting for Bill Gates," "Waiting for Jeff Bezos," and we put them in airports.
So the business travelers would see them, and they’d run up and say "Oh, is Bill Gates going to be here?"
Have there been any that have gone completely awry?
Absolutely.
That is one of the risks you run. You’re often creating these emotive, experiential campaigns, and sometimes the experiences aren’t always positive.
We’ve had our fair share of people arrested, a lot of citations given. We’ve done a lot of college guerilla marketing where you end up getting thrown off campus and asked never to come back.
Luckily no one has ever gotten hurt.
We did one for TheStreet.com where the campaign was "Listen to the whispers of Wall Street."
We went to every phone booth in the Wall Street area in New York and put up these stickers that had ears on them.
The problem was that the people we hired to do this got a little too excited about it, and they started putting stickers everywhere. They put them on the front door of the New York Stock Exchange, and at the NASDAQ as well.
Wall Street is an extremely clean area, so we got slapped pretty hard on the wrist and told either to clean them up or be charged $75 for every sticker that’s out there. And we put up 3,000 of them.
So we ended up sending the exact same team out the next night and removing every one they put up. Nothing as bad as what IBM just went through.
What do you make of IBM’s street-stenciling debacle, where thousands of stencils were painted on sidewalks of cities like San Francisco, to the irritation of local officials.
That’s an example of an advertising agency trying to do the work of a guerilla/alternative agency. We would have let IBM know the risks of doing what they’re doing.
Another thing is that they were trying to sell a Linux server, and they were treating it as a consumer launch.
How many people are in a position to purchase a very expensive Linux server from IBM?
For the money they spent, they probably could have given each of those people a server.
Is there a code of guerilla marketing? Are there unwritten rules?
You can find someone to do anything, so I don’t think there is a code. The ethic we use is, how can I make a difference to individual consumers and treat then as humans, not as demographics.
Look at Red Bull or Oprah. These are brands that have become synonymous with these webs of communication with people.
That is what we're trying to accomplish. Our goal is to make the next brand that people have faith in.
Is Interference the first agency dedicated exclusively to guerilla marketing?
I think we’re the first agency that has so unabashedly embraced guerilla marketing.
We don’t want to do print, we don’t want to do top-level advertising, we don’t want to do a yearlong concert tour with an 18-wheeler that unfolds into something.
I want to let the promotional people do what they do, I want to let the advertising people do what they do. What I want is for people to come to us when they want something a little different, something that makes connections.
There are a bunch of ad agencies that are offering guerilla marketing now, and when they try to do it themselves, I think you often get that IBM situation. I don’t think they’ve been on the street long enough to know what to do with it.
July 25, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Gabriel Spitzer is a staff writer for Media Life.
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