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bungled sidewalk caper
SF fumes over graffiti. Red face for Big Blue.
By Gabriel Spitzer
A really good media plan has to have at least one quirky, off-the-wall capper--blimps, barges, banana--anything to surprise and get attention.
Clients love this stuff.
In the San Francisco Bay area, where you practically have to sell a kidney to get billboard space, such guerrilla marketing has become common.
Even the stodgiest are doing it.
Yes, even IBM, for gosh sakes.
Several weeks ago, logos for IBM’s "Peace, Love and Linux" campaign, consisting of a peace symbol, a heart and that adorable Linux penguin, began appearing stenciled on sidewalks all over the city.
It seemed like a most clever idea. Pedestrians see the stencils, go, Oh, how clever, hmm. Then a good rain comes along and washes the stencils away.
You see, the genius here is that the stencils were in chalk, water-degradable chalk.
Except that they weren't--and didn't. The stencils were not biodegradable and didn't wash away. The stencils remain, blurred but an eyesore to angry San Franciscans.
Officials in San Francisco, as well as Chicago and Boston, where the sidewalk graffiti were also laid down, are treating the matter not as clever street art but as vandalism.
You see, defacing sidewalks in this fashion is a crime, a misdemeanor, and it matters not that you use chalk.
A presumably embarrassed IBM says it is working with the San Francisco Public Works Department to blast off the estimated 1,000 ads with steam and baking soda.
"Cleanup has been ongoing. On April 18 we contacted IBM, and they said they’d hire a local vendor and that it would be gone in a matter of days. A week went by and the ads were still on our sidewalks, so we took it on ourselves to clean it up," says Christine Falvey, a spokeswoman for the public works department.
"We’ve since received a letter from IBM’s attorney saying they would clean it up and pay for the damage. At this point, IBM is cooperating."
Yet a number of mysteries remain.
IBM insists that the campaign has been discontinued. The company has sent two executives to San Francisco to make peace and has issued a formal apology to the mayor of San Francisco.
But this week, as cleanup progressed, new stencils in different colors have begun reappearing. The city does not know whether the new stencils are the work of IBM or, to pull a term from the mothballs of the '60s, an outside agitator.
Another mystery of sorts is that IBM is unable to tell the city exactly where the stencils are or even how many there are.
IBM claims that it doesn’t even know what agency subcontracted to do the stenciling, let alone who did the stenciling itself.
"It’s been very hard to find out what agencies have been hired. Ogilvy & Mather is the one who executed the campaign; they hired another agency who hired another agency. They’re going back to see which agencies were hired as well. In the meantime, we’re cleaning up," says IBM spokeswoman Trink Guarino.
"We are very sympathetic with the city and we’re very apologetic. We’re good corporate citizens and we care about these cities and the people who live there."
Ogilvy & Mather did not return phone calls seeking comment.
This lack of knowledge on IBM's part strikes some as fishy. After all, Big Blue is somewhat famous for micromanaging its media campaigns.
"It shouldn’t take two weeks to figure out who did what," says Mohammed Nuru, deputy director of operations for San Francisco's public works department.
Jim Powers, deputy director of the international anti-graffiti organization NoGraf Network, also believes that IBM’s ignorance about the campaign is suspect.
"Knowing their corporate style, I’ve never known IBM to be delegators and to have the folks in the office not know what’s going on in the field. At IBM everything was always centrally managed in the past, and I can’t believe that they wouldn’t know about this back at Big Blue," says Powers.
Meanwhile, who did the actual "artwork" remains a mystery.
IBM claims that the chain of contractors ended with a local "agency" or "vendor" who did the actual stenciling. But privately, some observers believe that one of the agencies simply hired kids to do the stenciling late at night.
"You go down the street and there are 20 of them there, and you wonder, who did it? What time did they do it? Did anybody see them? It is a misdemeanor, so whether they were hired to do it or not, they could face misdemeanor charges," says Falvey.
Officials in San Francisco, which spent a reported $22 million last year trying to eradicate graffiti, are considering fines of up to $500 per ad for IBM in addition to cleanup costs.
The city has so far cleaned up over 100 ads left over from IBM’s initial cleanup effort, meaning that the San Francisco campaign could cost IBM up to $50,000 in fines alone.
But with all the press attention the campaign has received, the whole thing could ultimately pay for itself in free publicity.
"I’d like to see a big fine for IBM. Their silence really disturbs me, and it makes me think maybe they were doing this just for the publicity," says NoGraf’s Powers.
May 8, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Gabriel Spitzer is a staff writer for Media Life.
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