How Not To Market

This web site has a good take on some viral marketing campaigns that were poorly conceived from the start, and ended badly. Not surprisingly, the Splinter Cell promotion is one of them.

Yes, it's possible to get into trouble when you get too creative with your marketing ideas. How do you avoid this? Give your marketing ideas some reality checks before implementing them.

1. Is it legal? If you're not sure, you'd better check the local ordinances. If you're doing some kind of event, you may need a permit. Or you may need to talk to the local police department and get clearance, or at least inform them of what's going to be happening. Property owners should be consulted; if you're not on their property with permission you could be in trouble.
2.  Is there a danger? If you have someone dressed up in a military outfit and carrying a weapon or three, even though they may be toy weapons, this should be a red flag. Police might well be called by nervous citizens, and people who wave toy weapons around can get shot. Danger can come from stunts or feats, or it can come from just looking dangerous.
3. Will this help? Once you've figured out if your stunt is legal and not dangerous, you do have to consider whether it will actually help your marketing efforts in some way. What's the goal of this stunt? How does it translate into added sales? Ultimately, if you can't show how stripping down to a thong, painting yourself blue, and standing next to Apple's headquarters will help make more money from your iPhone game, you shouldn't do it, even if it is legal and not dangerous. Your marketing efforts should be oriented to making money, and you should have a way to measure their effectiveness. If you want to pull a stunt to raise awareness of your product, hoping that higher awareness means higher sales, then measure it! Don't pull some stunt that will make you and your product look bad, annoy customers, or otherwise cause problems.

So have a chuckle reading about this foolish marketing stunts, and notice how application of these three reality checks should have prevented these marketing disasters.

Event Marketing Gone Bad

Event marketing is a cool way to draw attention to your product. You create some sort of event, something unusual that gets press coverage, and usually you'll spend far less than you would for advertising to get some attention. As you might expect, there's a way to do this right... and a way to do it wrong. The wrong method is illustrated by this attempt at getting attention for the upcoming release of Splinter Cell Conviction; you hire a guy to dress up like a wounded man from the game and point a fake gun at people in a downtown area. As you might expect, this gets reported to the police, w, who show up and point real guns at the guy.

Fortunately, no one was shot, though you might think about shooting the marketing guy that thought this was a good idea. Making up interesting events to draw attention can be a good idea; making up events that can potentially create hazardous situations is not. This idea should have been, pardon the expression, shot down in the marketing meeting before it ever got out into the street.