Outsourcing to Guerillas

By outsourcing to guerillas, I am not referring to transferring business functions over to our primate cousins. I am referring to hiring an outside company to create and execute guerilla style campaigns. This rather new marketing function is not as easily accomplished as scanning radio and television ratings and viewship demographics and then placing advertisments there. Oh no, gurilla marketing involves a whole lot more. It involves street smarts, knowing what hot and whats not, understanding consumer trends, and knowing the ins and outs of the location in which campaign is to be executed. In other words, one should leave guerilla marketing to the experts.

These experts come in many forms. One of the more noterious companies is GoGuerilla. This company offers various services that focus around printing your organizations name on unexpected objects your target consumer may come into contact with while going about their day to day business. These objects are rather random such as condoms, matchbooks, waterbottles, etc. There website is very extensive and even offers media matching services allowing you to consider your exact target and effective methods to reach them. They have other services too such as postcards and poster hangings.

Many other companies exist and do not specialize to such a degree. Go Guerilla Media does a specific function and many businesses require a more personalized list of guerilla services. Outsourcing is still my recommendation. I experienced such outsourcing first hand over the summer of 2005. I interned for MKTG Partners. It is a small marketing firm that specializes in outdoor events. During my internship the shoe company, Nike, was working through us to execute their summer marketing activities. They were seeking new, innovative, unexpected, and fun ways to reach their consumers. We did just that for them. We designed different campaigns for their many many objectives. Nike is constantly in the midst of a million projects from professional sponsorships to hosting local basketball tournamants.

The projects I worked on were guerilla marketing wrapped up with some viral and interactive strategies, essentially they were unconventional as hell. My favorite was when NIKE bought out two billboards in the middle of Times Square to promote their new individually customized shoes. One of the boards had a phone number on it and the other had a shoe. The objective was to call the phone number and if you got through, you used your keypad on your cell phone to change the color of the shoe on the other billboard. Nike gave out 1 pair of shoes a minute for free throughout the five hour event. My job was to organize, dress, and prep a street team to walk up and down Broadway rallying attention to the billboards by pointing and say things like, "Check it out" "Its changing" "Free Shoes". It was so much fun. People would get so excited, standing there for hours calling and calling and then suddenly someone would start screaming, "Oh my Goodness, I got through, I'm changing the shoe!!!".
Another Guerilla marketing event my company did involved mimicking a commercial. When the the Nike Free sneaker came out, Nike had a commercial of people running down the beach in all white wearing the new shoes. Our company in turn outfitted a group of runners in the same gear and they ran all over Manhattan as in the commericial.

Companies Must not be afraid to go places no one has gone before. Its the only way to break through the clutter and get noticed. However one should consult the experts before throwing an entire marketing budget into these kinds of campaigns. There are many risks involved.