Gazzetta Dello Sport
In Milan there is a newspaper called the Gazzetta dello Sport. Faced with needing to increase circulation throughout Milan they set about considering marketing plans and campaigns. It soon became clear that they would need to think beyond normal campaigns and so came into contact with Guerrilla Marketing. The newspaper itself was printed on pink paper – maybe this could be incorporated into some form of marketing ploy. Some bright spark thought of turning Milan pink. Not literally but via pink confetti or paper dropped from the sky and carpeting Milan. The Milanese first did not understand what was happening and did not link the pink confetti with the newspaper. This is the unacceptable face of Guerrilla Marketing because of the after effects. The whole place had to be cleaned up at some cost. The circulation did not increase significantly. The target audience was mainly male because of the sporting connection, and all the males with a sporting interest already bought the paper anyway. In short, the marketing ploy failed and at the same time polluted the centre of Milan for a few days. Certainly there are better ways to win friends and influence people. So OK, that is my view, what do you guys out there think? Did it succeed in a raw marketing way? Was the pollution and clean up effort worth the marketing advantage? I think not.
Arguably the most famous, or should that be infamous, guerrilla marketing campaign to date was that of a Time Warner subsidiary, Turner Broadcasting inc. Moving away from traditional marketing strategies they “thought out of the box” when it came to advertising their new cartoon show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”. They placed 40 small, black, electronically operated light boxes, around different cities including Boston, Mass. The marketing campaign backfired in Boston because people linked these boxes to bombs and caused wide spread panic. The whole point of what is called guerrilla marketing is to get the product or service into the forefront of the public. There is no doubt that this marketing campaign did exactly that. So was the campaign successful? If you measure success by the effect the campaign has on the general public then yes, it was a success. However, officialdom took a totally different view. The mayor called the event a “stunt” perpetrated solely in the interest of profit. He has a point and looked at from his point of view criticism is justified. But what about John Q. Citizen? The people the campaign was directed to? Most thought on reflection that the marketing campaign was good. I think I will side with them on this one.
A company in Baden-Wurttemberg had brought on line a new geothermal power station, delivering electricity cleanly and quietly to the area. EnBw wanted to make everyone in the region aware of this power station. They decided to move beyond normal marketing thinking and enlisted the help of the newly emerging guerrilla marketing industry. They came up with a good idea, one that would be right in the face of the public. They made large white stickers for the ground and stuck onto it two round metal posts to make the whole thing look like a huge German power plug. On the sticker they wrote the slogan “Energy that doesn’t disappear. Geothermal Heat2. Aside from the couple of people with bad eyesight falling over them, the campaign certainly did what it set out to do. To me this is an acceptable use of the so-called guerrilla marketing industry. For the money spent it is arguable if any other advertising method could have achieved the same effect. The campaign itself was non- polluting and therefore contributing to a “green” environment. However, it could not be said to be non-invasive as the area of the “plug” was around a square metre.