Guerrilla Advertising

The momentous first post. In my desperate struggle to decide upon how to open this blog I came across some of my old work including my dissertation from my final year of University. So I thought it would be nice to share with you an essay I wrote for it entitled 'Guerrilla Advertising' (inspired by the book below), with pictures and previously unknown spelling errors corrected. I hope you at least find it interesting, enjoy:

Guerrilla Advertising
by Carlo Jaconelli

With more and more companies desperately seeking our attention every day, marketing and advertising departments are now employing alternative (and often risky) strategies to ensure that we all take notice. This form of advertising is intelligent, knows the laws of the street and craves attention regardless of the monetary or legal costs. Taking heavy inspiration from military tactics and warfare, guerrilla advertising doesn’t always aim to advertise through the traditional avenues of television, billboard and press; three ever increasingly expensive options that are now becoming ever diluted as our choice of channels, periodicals and entertainment grow.

Niccolo Dei Machiavelli famously wrote in his play The Prince, “Whoever deserves constant success must change his conduct with the times”. This is especially true in the world of advertising a new product or service. This is because we, the public, are being continually saturated and bombarded with logos and company ads trying to distract attention away from our daily lives and acknowledge a product we are not interested in. An advertisement has to work extremely hard to fight its way through the crowd into our consciousness. This is precisely where guerrilla advertising differs and has the upper hand. It endeavours to make the consumer an integral part of the ad experience by opening up a dialogue between the consumer and advertiser. By asking questions, trying to shock or conveying an idea an advertisement now has the power to draw us closer and inspire discussion about a product’s story or creed.

Guerrilla advertising predictably takes a very militant view on reaching its targeted audience. As an alternative to launching a nationwide campaign involving thirty-second TV ads, billboard posters, newspaper ads and major media exposure, costing a small fortune, this guerrilla tactic carefully snipes at its intended audience with a long series of minor strikes. The subsequent costs incurred are, in general, far less than a full-scale offensive. The use of these military terms are warranted as there is a real conflict transpiring on our streets, in our magazines, in our computer games, in our music and culture where a company’s ability to survive is directly dependant on our ability to acknowledge them.

Guerrilla campaigns do not solely exist as a means to advertise cheaply however. A very recent big-budget example that proves this is the new set of Playstation 3 adverts for Christmas 2007. Four separate thirty-second short films were produced to promote different aspects of the consoles performance where it has the edge over the competition. The four were entitled ‘Technology that updates itself’, ‘Faster processing to stay one step ahead of you’, ‘Games that move you in mysterious ways’ and ‘Blu-ray makes everything more beautiful’. Although these titles sound very specific and technical, the films themselves are extremely conceptual. Each one depicts a situation relating to its title in a very loose and indirect way.


For example in “Blu-ray makes everything more beautiful” a man clad in a red latex suit known as ‘Dr Beautiful’ confidently walks eerily and unsteadily towards a metallic spherical machine clutching a scruffy dog. He then places the dog into the machine and secures the door shut while a troop of smiling nurses watch in the background. After a few seconds he reopens the door and with an unnerving smile reveals the dowdy canine now clean, fluffy and bejewelled. The logo ‘Playstation 3’ makes a very brief two-second appearance at the end of the ad. Not once was an actual video game or Playstation 3 machine mentioned or shown on the screen, neither quite frankly, was Christmas! The whole scene was a metaphor for how the superior storage capacity of Blu-ray discs (50Gb) for this system allows games developers more memory to produce better graphics. This method of advertising a potentially alienating subject matter allows viewers to arrive at their own conclusions as to what this advert means. It draws more people in, people who would not necessarily even be interested in gaming and encourages them to discuss Playstation as a brand and a philosophy other that just a new piece of hardware. The collection of advertisements are distributed in a unique way also. They are shown on television and in cinemas but are also available to download free straight onto a Playstation 3 console and PSP system enabling consumers to share them with friends and family even on the move. Through sharing and discussion the consumer has become a vital part of the commercial process of the system, a much more effective way to engrain a product or brand into ones consciousness than simply blaring it at their faces.

So guerrilla advertising can take a variety of forms and be effectively used by multi-billion pound companies. However taking guerrilla advertising outdoors offers those on a low budget a completely different canvass, the streets. A very fertile ground for marketing, the street is a cacophony of billboards, posters, lights, logos, sounds and leaflets all vying for our attention. Companies pay colossal amounts of money that allow them the permission to scream down on us telling us that we’re not good enough and that their product will make us better people. Banksy, now a household name in the field of street art, has written in his book Wall And Piece that advertisers ‘abuse you everyday’ and that any public advert ‘is yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it’. Small low-budget businesses and groups with a message to deliver have taken to this belief well. In fact they see the whole street as being theirs to manipulate as they see fit. This could include defacing a prime city location with the group manifesto, spraying stencilled logos onto road signs or launching a colossal sticker campaign.

Not all methods of guerrilla advertising have to be so illegal however. This clever form of advertising knows how to weave its way through the law and still achieve its goal. For example one online company called Street Advertising Services deals with a number of commissions for groups wishing to get their logo on the streets. One of their methods involves using an industrial water and steam cleaner that washes around a stencil with the company’s message or logo onto a street pavement or brick wall. This method is environmentally ethical and leaves a very sharp image on the desired surface.


More importantly is that this practice of ‘clean advertising’ is completely legal. There are no laws that prohibit the cleaning of the city’s streets. Therefore this method has been utilised in some high profile streets and locales. Even Glasgow Caledonian University has been a target of this approach for the launch of the Xbox 360 video game ‘Gears of War’.

What of the future of guerrilla advertising? With advances in technology and methods of communication over the past ten, even five, years we have seen a shift in how we are being contacted and reached by companies. The unstoppable force of the Internet, unwanted pop-ups, spam/junk emails and weighty endorsements are changing our social landscape morally and physically. What is even more interesting is the role we, the consumers, are playing in this elaborate production. Companies are becoming smarter, appealing to our senses on a larger scale. They know what will affect us and how they will approach us. In some instances they are using us to spread their material without us even recognising it.

Luckily there will always be those who act independently of this charade, those who act outside the normal rules of engagement and speak freely, whatever their message, whether legal or not. It is easy to lose faith in the corporate nature of society when we live in a city that can’t construct some scaffolding without pasting onto it a gargantuan poster. In fact this very act of sheer profitable commercialism should be enough to inspire anyone to hit the streets, their streets, and make their mark.