To be sure, creating and engineering hot beverage dispensers that will only fill coffee cups when coordinated with a machine across the square – and filming (from inside the dispenser) the folks operating said machines– may not be an effort as great as turning around the Queen Mary, but it is not to be sniffed at either.
This Nescafé event required planning, engineering, design, installation, film crews, coordination, and not a small amount of expertise and – money. But that doesn’t make it any less a charming bit of Guerrilla Marketing from OgilvyOne, as it was staged on the streets of Frankfurt. Without casts of actors, set designers and special effects, this was, after all, a marvelous little gimmick designed to get people to smile and share, and to keep us focused on Nescafé, a brand I haven’t paid attention to in decades.
A rather big jump from the original idea of Guerrilla Marketing; once, a bunch of kids stenciling a logo on street corners all through the night, so that city dwellers might collectively awake to a new idea outside their windows. Total cost: 25 gallons of paint, twenty-five stencils and fifty college students. Get going. Maybe the Guerrilla idea is growing up. Maybe the idea of introducing proficiency and standards to a medium that used to run on youth and energy alone, is a sign of great work to come. A good way, I think, to be spending ad production dollars.
Here’s the rub: I found this lovely little Nescafé piece somewhat by accident, on LinkedIn. But I would love to see a larger commitment on the part of media folks in reaching out to specific and larger audiences. If Guerrilla events can grow up, perhaps the idea of Viral Placement can also be re-examined and exchanged for focus and skill and greater insight and a level of professional care that has seemed to be dismissed of late. I know – I am old fashioned. But I am waiting for the world to rediscover the fact that high standards should be valued because they (more often than not) worked.
Recent Comments