The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'guerilla marketing'
2005/12/5
In an attempt to generate spin for the PlayStation Portable, Sony hire graffiti/paste-up artists to put up pictures of kids playing with PSPs as if they were traditional toys. Local hipsters, irritated with the Spectacle's commodification of dissent (and/or copy-protection malware on Sony CDs), retaliate, scrawling anti-Sony slogans on them. Discussion ensues:
"Aaaaaarrrrggggghhh. I KNEW something wasn't right about the thing when I took a picture of it a couple weeks ago in san Francisco. Two kids. 6-feet tall. Right near the new freeway off-ramp. Looked way too clean to be real. Working for a branding firm. I'm adamantly opposed to this kind of infiltration by the big corporations. Equivalent in my mind with viral marketing stealth efforts to generate a buzz about a new product the unsuspecting masses by some cool, attractive shill on the company payroll."And more pictures here.
2004/6/28
The next trend in graffiti, after aerosol art, stencil art and pasted-on designs, involves selectively cleaning grimy walls. It's much like stencil art, only rather than applying aerosol paint, the artist uses solvent and scrubs a shaped area of the wall clean, creating a distinct image. And, led by the apparent legality of cleaning public surfaces, guerilla advertisers are getting onboard; some chap in Leeds named "Moose" has been commissioned by Diageo to advertise Smirnoff vodka in this fashion. The Leeds City Council, however, doesn't quite see it that way.
2002/8/15
An article on stencil bombing; the use of illicit spray-painting (with smoothly designed stencils) as an underground advertising tool; predominantly by trendy T-shirt labels in Prahran (you know, the ones that sell $80 T-shirts where the logo accounts for $79.50 of the price).
Tim Everist, who runs a Prahran-based T-shirt label called Schwipe, says "stencil bombing was effective and underground in the '90's, but then all the big companies started using this form of advertising".