October 24, 2002: within 24 hours, incredibly large numbers of stickers saying “It’s better with the butterfly” are plastered all over Manhattan, covering sidewalks, windows, and buildings. The perpetrators are employed by an agency specializing guerrilla marketing, Alt Terrain. The butterfly-shaped stickers form a veritable swarm going from Times Square, where a huge MSN billboard oversees the traffic below, to Central Park, where Microsoft has planned a software release event.
This type of marketing campaign is illegal in New York: the public and the City criticized the corporation and ordered it to rid the streets of the stickers. A failed advertising campaign? Note really, the stickers were electromagnetically attached, not glued, and so were easily removed. More to the point, the street ads generated lots of buzz around the release and plenty of press articles commenting on the marketing initiative.
Advertising no longer is something you see on billboards, in print or on TV. The landscape has radically changed, and advertising has evolved new ways to communicate with target groups. Brands leave shelves and try to intercept the consumer on the streets, in environments traditionally unassociated with consumption. Marketing takes on exotic and cool adjectives to define its novel approaches, such as street, tribal, buzz, viral, and especially guerrilla, marketing (term coined by Jay Conrad Levinson). The priority is to reach the target in unconventional ways, so to trigger communication viruses that can self-propagate. Other examples can help us illustrate the henomenon. For instance, Converse invites consumers to send self-edited videos where they describe their experience with “Chuck Taylor” All Star sneakers. Dove launched its latest product with a TV ad written and produced by female consumers and broadcasted by ABC during the Academy Awards. In fact, it is consumers who have a better knowledge of products and thus are better placed to define their meanings. And going straight to the Web, Dior Joaillerie struck gold when it launched in January Victoire de Castellane’s new collection on Second Life, the virtual community of avatars started in 2003.
The most tangible sign of this change is the creation of specialized viral marketing divisions in all major advertising firms: Chuco in JWT; Saatchi & Saatchi X, DDB’s Tribal, and so on. Traditional advertising is not dying, but guerrilla marketing techniques are infusing it with new life.
by Arianna Brioschi e Anna Uslenghi,
Instructors in the Bocconi Master of Marketing Communication