Guerrilla Marketing Gone Wild

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An Insider Wink

To Levinson, despite the media spotlight on Turner as a result of the campaign, the events were a "misuse of" and "smear across" the discipline, with the advertiser totally overlooking the perpetual jumpiness of authorities in major cities across the U.S.. "This would have been a really cool campaign in a pre-9/11 world," he says. Certainly, the events have forged a debate over the role of ethics in such campaigns. What is the line between obtrusive and intrusive, between subtle and subversive, between newsworthy and sensational? A dialogue once reserved for brainstorming sessions in Madison Avenue offices has made its way into dinner-table discussion in homes across America.

In its own view, Turner was simply playing buddy-buddy to Adult Swim's core audience of males aged 18 to 24. "Because there was no call to action, we thought [the campaign] would only engage our core audience. To anybody else, we anticipated it would be ignored," says Shirley Powell, senior vice-president of communications for Turner Broadcasting. "It was supposed to be an insider wink to our fans."

That's a common guerrilla technique, says Peter Stabler, director of communications strategy for San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. "In Turner's recognition of their community, the hope is they will galvanize fans to speak about it. After one person proclaims, 'I know what that thing on the bridge is!' there's the hope that it will start feeding itself," Stabler says.

Ethical Breach?

But in Boston, it appears, Adult Swim insiders failed to educate those around them to what was really going on. And when that chain of command broke down, Turner's lack of transparency and failure to notify the authorities ahead of time came back to bite the company.

Such precautions are identified in the Ethics Code published by the Word of Mouth Marketing Assn., a three-year-old Chicago trade organization representing more than 250 advertising agencies worldwide. "Within the code is honesty of relationship, honesty of opinion, and honesty of identity. This campaign danced around the edges of all those," says Paul Rand, director of communications for WOMMA and partner of public-relations agency Ketchum.

Rand notes that this wasn't the first time Interference Inc. eschewed advertiser transparency. In 2002, Sony Ericsson worked with Interference on a campaign where actors demonstrated the photo capabilities of its new T68i mobile phone in real-life settings. Some, dressed as tourists, idled near landmarks like the Empire State Building and handed the phone to passersby to take a souvenir picture. Others, attractive women, sat at bars and tried to spark conversation about their "recent purchase." A wave of negative backlash from the press and industry insiders denounced the campaign for its subversive tactics and labeled it "human spam."

Real World Rules

Rand doesn't believe the backlash against Interference's campaign in Boston will stop guerrilla marketers in their tracks, but he hopes it will urge them to exercise greater caution. "What this does do is continue to underline for marketers the need to be transparent and credible in their communications," he says. "A lot of lawyers and legal regulatory people within marketing organizations will step up and be very aggressive about this," agrees Euro's Notarianni. "Internally, there will be a lot of discussion about this, but you probably won't see too many campaigns being canceled."

But, says Kevin Roddy, executive director of Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York, it's a timely reminder to advertisers to remember the real world in which all advertising must play out. "Some people in this business will go, 'Boy, I'm not getting noticed. Instead of making the piece of work better, I'm going to make it more obnoxious,'" he says. "Then we wonder why we can't get a client's trust." It's safe to speculate that, for the time being at least, Turner will be keeping the guerrilla on ice.

MacMillan is a reporter at BusinessWeek.com in New York. Helen Walters is the editor for BusinessWeek.com's Innovation and Design Channel.