Ad firms lay down arms in guerrilla campaigns

It was, perhaps, among the final, lingering vestiges of dot-com hubris. In summer 2001, San Francisco ad agency Ammo Marketing hired 40 beautiful women to enter bars, pant "Save me" into men's ears, drop business cards into their pockets and promptly disappear.

Predictably, most of the men called the number emblazoned on the cards. But instead of the answering machines of svelte females, they got pitches for a new online game from Electronic Arts called Majestic. It may have been a novel exercise in social indirection, but it was not a model for the future, Ammo creative director Amy Finn now says.

It's not just that customers don't often like to be tricked and teased, Finn said, but that such ruses have become a little tiresome.

"That approach isn't so novel, the media isn't so interested, and if you don't run things properly, you run the risk of being invasive," she said. "So our approach has evolved."

Indeed, so-called "guerrilla marketing," a form of cheap, bold, grassroots advertising that San Francisco ad agencies helped pioneer, has become so institutionalized and commonplace that local ad shops have become reluctant to use it, preferring to save such tactics only for particular clients and campaigns.

But that creative imperative is running up against continued enthusiasm from advertisers, who still see guerrilla marketing as a cost-effective way to stretch their ever-thinning media budgets. That's because guerilla tactics, hiring dozens of models aside, can include low-cost options like "wild posting," the plastering around cities of ads copied onto standard letter-sized paper, chalking messages onto sidewalks or giving freebies to key "tastemakers" or "influencers."

Combined with conventional advertising on television or in the print media, ad pros say, such tactics can be invaluable in hammering home a commercial message and sealing up a decision in a consumer's mind. But taken alone, the tactics look and cost a lot like a high school student government campaign, and probably won't move a brand any further.

"We got business prospects to whom we would say, 'What's the media budget?'" said Millie Olson, president of Amazon Advertising in San Francisco. "They would answer, 'Let's do guerrilla marketing!' And we would say, 'Ahh: There is no media budget.'"

Olson said she likes to save guerrilla tactics not only for companies with a budget for other media but also for products whose demand developed organically, from the bottom up. For example, her firm is working to develop a campaign for Kashi brand cereal, from Kashi Company of La Jolla.

"It's a brand that has been sort of picked up by people and spread around by people," she said.

If guerrilla marketing remains a cost-effective way to promote grass-roots products, it is also a quick way to ruin the image of little-known brands, particularly small firms that don't have the budget to overcome the effects of a guerrilla marketing misfire. That makes an advertising firm's job especially precarious and tricky.

Daniel Wolfe of Wolfe/Doyle Advertising in San Francisco is formulating a campaign for Remy Amerique's Mount Gay Rum, an underdog brand that has asked exclusively for guerrilla-style tactics, or as Wolfe calls them, "below the line," since they are meant to enhance the value of a conventional media buy that is considered "above the line." Wolfe said Remy was his first client to make such a request, but that clients are seeking guerrilla marketing more often amid the difficult economy.

"We would come in with value-added ideas that were below the line -- 'you can enhance this media buy by doing this,'" Wolfe said. "Sometimes now that's all they're doing ... because of a lot of budgets being cut."

Guerrilla marketing is an ideal fit in this case, Wolfe said, not just because Mount Gay has 1 percent or less of the market, compared with around 40 percent for Bacardi, but also because its advertising is aimed at young men, an ideal demographic for aggressive media campaigns.

Wolfe's past campaigns have included blustery ads that fit comfortably into bar culture, like a baseball game from 3DO that was promoted with coasters reading, on one side, "Strike out tonight?" and, on the other, "Then go home and play with yourself."

Wolfe said that while guerrilla marketers have certainly lost some of their swagger, their tactics have become a permanent part of the advertising landscape.

"Everything comes around in cycles," he said.

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