Guerrilla Marketing Gone Bad

Creativity in marketing is a good thing, right? It gets attention out of proportion to the time and money spent. So what's the down side? If you don't take enough care in thinking through the consequences of your marketing, you can get some bad PR... or a fine... or possible legal action. Zynga's new marketing stunt for their upcoming Mafia Wars II game has gotten lots of the wrong sort of attention from the San Francisco City Attorney. Zynga pasted (fake) $25,000 bills onto the sidewalk in five different SF locations, and it's taken the Department of Public Works a good amount of effort to clean them up. The City Attorney is angry enough that they are demanding all of Zynga's information relating to the marketing campaign. Plus the City Attorney's office says that just paying the cleanup costs isn't enough, and they intend to pursue this case further. Yikes.

OK, so pasting the fake bills down did get more attention than just handing them out on a street corner... but the wrong sort of attention. You could have had guys in period Mafia clothing handing out the bills and gotten some nice local news coverage. Instead you have news stories about how Zynga is costing the city money at a time when city budgets are under siege.

So the take-home lesson is this: Creativity in marketing is good, when leavened with common sense and thorough analysis. Or you could be sleeping with the fishes.

Guerrilla Marketing at Comic-Con

Fans of guerrilla marketing (count me in!) will appreciate these efforts at the recent San Diego Comic-Con.Many companies were busy marketing their movies and TV shows to the hundreds of thousands of fans at the show (yes, attendance is close to 200,000!). But it's worth checking out these successful marketing stunts.

One was a truck handing out free slices of garlic bread to boost Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, a new movie coming soon (about a garlic-bread-obsessed slacker). Expensive, but it certainly dragged in a lot of people. (Though in the packed hallways and rooms of Comic-Con, the addition of thousands of slices of free garlic bread must not have helped the atmosphere.)

My favorite was the stunt with the guys dressed like government agents with packets labeled Confidential Information (pictured above). They weren't handing them out; you had to ask, and then they would give you one with a warning... inside you'd find a redacted document leading you a website for the upcoming NBC series The Event. Nicely done, and you could pull this off very cheaply. A few friends in black suits willing to stand in the hot sun for hours... well, maybe it might not be so cheap at that. But cheaper than free garlic bread!

The Skyline promo was weird and probably costly... they had human shaped masses of soap bubbles floating past a billboard.

The Kenny Powers promo (for an HBO comedy series) was a simple flyer, backed by street teams with some freebies. Again, it's not that expensive, just some clever thinking connected to the premise of the show that gets people to a web site and gets them talking to their friends.

Finally, the Dexter scavenger hunt (for the Showtime series about a serial killer) was elaborate but effective. Every lanyard for the show was involved, so you know this had to have some serious bucks thrown down. A special scavenger hunt built into an iPhone/Android app connected well to the demographics of their target audience.

There's some good ideas here for you to think about when you need an interesting marketing event that won't break the bank.