Guerrilla Marketing

Taking a page from their customer friendly food service model, Burger King recently took “Have It Your Way” into the realms of D.I.Y. fashion.  A collaboration between 5 designers and artists tasked with reinterpreting elements of Burger King’s icons and logos culminated at an event held in Chicago on October 24th.  The gathering invited participants to take part in the studio creation process by silk-screening the final designs onto their own clothing in any combination they chose.  Essentially, a clever form of marketing that allowed Burger King to subvert their own image, while at the same time maintaining recognizable aspects familiar to their wider audience.  The company has also pushed this idea a step further with Burger King Studio, a site that takes the hands-on experience and introduces it to the online space.  Users have the ability to design their own T-shirts using the same details from the out-of-home event with additional levels of customizable options available, promising the uniqueness you want without fear of “getting ink all over yourself.”  Additional happenings have already been scheduled for November 7th and 21st.

Guerrilla marketing is now old news, it seems any corporate entity can hire a team of creative youngsters and plaster their image all over town. If you have an innovative approach for venues, you can find a marketing opportunity anywhere. Take the recipe directory called Recipe8, they found a free spot to publicize their URL in an unlikely place full of traffic, BugMeNot. The hugely popular resource for bypassing free login credentials has now become a soap box for free advertising. By putting their URL as a bogus login utilized for the New York Times, Recipe8 has gotten a smidgen of publicity under the torrents of advertising that sweeps the web daily.

[via AdLab]

The New York Times has a detailed review of Campfire Media’s campaign for HBO and their new television series True Blood. It describes the intense effort the agency makes to create story telling across media:

On May 21, HBO, the Los Angeles agency …And Company, and Campfire, a small independent agency founded by two of the creators of the 1999 film “The Blair Witch Project,” began sending cryptic letters in black envelopes sealed with red wax to people who might generously be described as pillars of the goth community: horror film bloggers, subscribers to the horror movie magazine Fangoria and the like.

The letters were written in dead languages like Babylonian and Ugaritic, but — to no one’s surprise — the recipients duly pitched in to translate them. The group effort, carried out on blogs and message boards, led to a macabre Web site guarded by a beautiful vampire, where visitors could view short prequel episodes to HBO’s new series and learn about a product called Tru Blood that obviates the need for vampires to feast on humans.

The campaign for the show, “True Blood,” based on a series of vampire books by Charlaine Harris, is shaping up to be the most extensive that HBO has ever undertaken.

By the time the program begins, the promotional effort will be four months old, having required the full-time attention of six Campfire employees who are monitoring message boards, maintaining a fake blog and coordinating the precisely timed release of new materials. In addition, 20 freelancers are working on other technical aspects of the campaign. HBO and Campfire began plotting the effort in February.

…“True Blood,” about a world where vampires emerge from the shadows to join everyday society, would seem to be a good candidate for such a promotion. It comes with a built-in fan base of people who have read the vampire mysteries, but the plot is complex enough that viewers could benefit from some advance explanation.

NY Times

The growth and cost-effectiveness of “Ambush Marketing” has driven offical sponsors of the Olympics to push for a ban.  Luckily for them, China has a well established system for clamping down on all things lacking government approval.  China has banned athletes from bringing their own drinks to events and will take over all prominent advertising locations, allowing only promotional material carrying official sponsorship.

The Economist reports:

Ambush marketers have replaced hooligans as the villains of sporting events, because they undermine official sponsors, which are the main source of revenue in some sports. The stakes are highest at the Olympics. This year 12 firms, including Coca-Cola, Samsung and Visa, have paid a total of $866m to be official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics—and they want exclusivity.

Playing the Game
Image Courtesy of Robert F. Bukaty - Associated Press via The Big Picture

OK. The conference in San Francisco is now a week away and we’re rather excited. We’ve got an amazing bunch of speakers talking about an amazing bunch of ideas and trends. And there’s a free party for anyone who can or can’t make it - co-hosted by Behance with drinks provided by Gawker Media.

Here is the latest agenda. If you’re in the area - come buy a ticket. If you’re not. Send this to a friend!

For Tickets: http://www.psfk.com/psfk-conference-san-francisco
AGENDA

8.00 Registration

8.30 Opening Remarks
PSFK founder Piers Fawkes welcomes the audience and introduces the agenda.

8.45 Trends-Should you care?
Ed Cotton (BSSP) explains why trends and inspiration matter - and how you can judge and use them.

9.15 San Francisco Snapshot
What makes the Bay Area tick? Colin Nagy (Attention) leads a discussion with passionate locals discuss what aspects of local culture inspire them the most. Panel includes Amit Gupta (Photojojo), Jeremy Townsend (Ghetto Gourmet), Kevin Allison (Financial Times) and Liz Dunn (funnyordie.com)

10.00 Shape The World
Chris Riley (Apple) explains how three Bay Area residents have shaped his world.

10.30 Coffee

10.50 New Art
Since opening her online and offline art galleries, Jen Bekman (20×200) has witnessed (and encouraged) and new movement of artists, themes and styles. Bekman talks about the trends she sees in art and artists’ use of technology to connect with art-lovers and buyers.

11.20 Make It With Us
Ezra Cooperstein (Current TV) and Andrew Hoppin (NASA) describe how to shake up large bureaucratic industries (e.g.: aerospace and broadcast media) by turning customers into creators and collaborators

12.00 Making Inspiration Matter
Gathering trends and ideas may be important but how do you take inspiration and create change? Gareth Kay (Modernista) leads a discussion with Eric Corey Freed (Organic Architect), Frank Striefler (Media Arts Lab) and Josh Morenstein (fuseprojects).

12.30 Lunch

1.40 Thoughtful Change
Jean-Marie Shields (Starbucks) explains that the future will embrace brands that connect with consumers by converting ideas into Thoughtful Change.

2.10 Aligning Interests
When cynical people admit they’re idealistic you might be on to something; Publisher and Founding Editor Max Schorr shares his inspirations and learnings from the beginning of GOOD Magazine.

2.40 Look & Feel
Creative designer and inventor of Red, the award winning In Flight Entertainment system for Virgin America, speaks about innovation in the cabin worldwide.

3.20 Coffee

3.40 Using It
How can companies and organizations leverage social media to enhance consumer dialog, evolve product offering and improve sales. Bootstrapping expert George Parker will lead a discussion with leading marketing innovators Adrian Ho (Zeus Jones), Mark Lewis (DDB), Lynn Casey (Team Noesis) and Rohit Bhargava (Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence).

4.20 When Words Are Not Enough
Using experience design to enhance communications: George Murphy (Modo-Group) and John Pollard (Microsoft) describe how environments and technology helped consumers connect with the brand.

4.50 Behave
Josh Handy & Nate Pence talk about how they design the method way, and how design and creative both mirror and shape the organization.

5.20 Closing Remarks

7.00 We Like You Party With PSFK & Behance
Open to all at the Otis bar. Conference attendees will be automatically on the guest-list. Friends of Behance and PSFK can RSVP here.

For this years Wimbledon Tennis Championship, HSBC commissioned artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey to create a series of large photographs using one of their favorite mediums, grass. The pair started by photographing three people prior to the event; Tara Moore who competed in the qualifying tournament, Eddie Seaward the 15 year veteran groundsman at Wimbledon, and Coach Lizzie May who guides the Wimbledon Junior Tennis Initiative.

Back in the studio the artists develop the photos in a very similar way to printing in a darkroom. Large panels are seeded with grass and the images are projected on to them as negatives. The areas that get more light allow the grass to produce more chlorophyll and darken. It took about a week for projecting the image for 12 hours a day to complete the Wimbledon work.

The pair actually discovered this technique by accident. A few years back they were installing an indoor wall of grass in a gallery and left a ladder leaning against it.  When they later moved it, a faint outline  of  the ladder appeared. The artists then began to experiment with projecting images onto grass with a slide projector. Once the panels are exposed to sunlight or bring interior lights thought they begin to fade. They have developed light control techniques to lengthen the effect in gallery spaces.

[via creative review]

Get London Reading is a campaign by Booktrust to get Londoners reading books set in London. To promote the campaign, KentLyons have created a selection of installations around London, showing extracts from books in situ. The extracts appear on pavements, windows and rubbish, as though the words have fallen from a book.

www.getlondonreading.co.uk
www.kentlyons.com

We remember when it was a struggle to dig up $20 for a concert tee with a band logo, but you did it anyway to wear as a badge of honor for having been there/done that. Now Springwise reports on Diesel’s two interesting marketing campaigns at European music festivals this summer. First, Diesel will be hawking (for a whopping 161 euros) a limited edition pair of mud-resistant jeans designed especially for Denmark’s Roksilde festival, one of Europe’s largest with an expected 75,000 attendees. And at Pinkpop, a Dutch festival, Diesel provided showers, fresh towels, and “a little something for those pesky hangovers” - plus they handed out free Diesel underwear to a lucky few.

It’s not the same as wearing a band’s concert tee, but with your new Diesel underwear and special-edition jeans, at least concert-goers have branded memories to hold on to.

via Springwise

Earth friendly artist Edina Tokodi is a premier eco-inspired urban designer with work ranging from public art projects to commissioned green house developments. She has been granted prestigious scholarships including the Urban Design and Project Making scholarship from the Accademia di Belle Arte di Brera and was awarded by the Ludwig Foundation of Tokyo, Japan.

Most recently, the green gal has been commissioned by SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority to create signage around key influence spots around the underground stations and the Transportation Museum. SEPTA itself has quite an investment in helping reduce emissions and operates 32 diesel-electric hybrid buses with hopes of adding 400 by 2011.

The commission is meant to encourage people to think a little greener and remind them of their own green contribution just by choosing public transportation. It also aims to reach non-public transportation users and increase ridership.

This particular project has been named ‘Go Green’ and inhabitat has reported that the project took one month of materials preparation and that the exhibits will remain green for about a month and a half. The signage also showcases Edina’s signature moss graffiti technique that is visually quite spectacular.

Via inhabitat