Case Study: When a Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Backfires

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Early Friday morning, Ewen finally felt he had the time to post an apology on Interference's website, written after Turner's initial statement had been released late Wednesday.

He also called together his staff, knowing they would have the same questions about Interference's future that he'd been asking himself. He told them Interference hadn't lost any clients. Some had even called to offer statements of support. He thought the agency would be okay. It would pay part of the $2 million settlement Turner agreed upon with the city of Boston. But that Friday, Jim Samples, the head of Cartoon Network, resigned over the scare. Was it time to rethink Interference's guerrilla approach?

The Decision

On Monday and Wednesday, Ewen had breakfast meetings with trusted friends from the marketing world. He told them he was considering shifting Interference's direction.

"I'm thinking of pulling way back," he told Maurice Bernstein after they'd settled in at a table at Balthazar, a SoHo eatery near the agency's offices. Bernstein, who runs Giant Step, another guerrilla marketing firm, had contacted Ewen and had told him things would be fine. Bernstein still felt this way, even though one of Giant Step's clients had called to cancel a campaign. He was even a little jealous of Ewen's sudden notoriety, though he knew Ewen was mortified by it.

He looked at Ewen and thought to himself that his friend looked like he'd been through something profound. "You know, there's plenty of business out there," Bernstein said. Ewen smiled, and began talking about some of the things he had been thinking about doing to ensure that future campaigns don't backfire.

Ewen knew by the end of that week that he didn't want to significantly change what Interference did. "Ninety-nine percent of our campaigns have a very, very low risk potential," he says. He enjoys the variety of ideas he can pursue in guerrilla marketing. He knew he didn't want his agency to repackage "safe" campaigns and give them slight twists for new clients.

He says Interference will still do riskier campaigns, but will take more time to weigh the dangers, "things we may not have considered in the past. Impact on traffic flow, effect on the environment, potentials from every viewpoint...just putting on the hats of other people and doing a lot of scenario testing," he says.

So far, he's turned down every client that's come looking for the scandalous sort of attention the Aqua Teen campaign got.

And he wants to make it easier for guerrilla marketers to talk to cities. "Cities make it easy to shut down a few blocks for a movie or to put up a huge billboard," but aren't interested in helping guerrilla marketers, he says. Right now, he adds, cities make it hard to get permits for marketing campaigns like his but often aren't consistent in what they enforce. He wants to see municipal licensing bureaus for guerrilla marketers, so that the cities know what's coming and get paid a fee to let the campaigns happen. "We could be a revenue stream for them," he notes.

As for his own revenue stream, Interference seems to be doing fine, for now. It has not lost a client or any employees. In fact, Ewen says, Interference has run about a dozen significant campaigns since the crisis week, including one for a very large financial institution. Still, Ewen knows that things are not over yet. "It'll take time to see whether our volume of new business is up or down," he says.

The Experts Weigh In

A chance to learn

Nobody could have conceived that Lite-Brite cartoon character was going to evoke a bomb scare. Once you take the emotion out of it, it was a really innovative campaign. That's what people will remember. Many of the brands we work with are asking us for guerrilla marketing campaigns, with an element of mystery, but they don't really understand what it means. Ewen could elevate this experience into something for the industry to learn from, counseling on what it means. He should be out there speaking about this to industry groups.

Donna Sokolsky
Co-Founder
Spark PR
San Francisco

Work to fix the perception

Anytime anyone does a search on the agency, the incident will pop up. The agency needs to demonstrate that what happened was an aberration. The quickest thing it could do is issue a press release announcing a series of actions designed to ensure what happened in Boston cannot happen in the future. It would have to be specific, and the company would really have to implement these actions. I would follow the press release with a series of media interviews. On the next assignment, the agency needs to make sure it follows the new game plan.

Michael Sitrick
Founder And Chairman
Sitrick and Co.
Los Angeles and New York

He's picked his market

Ewen's got a Dennis Rodman thing going there, where you either love him or you hate him. It could work very well for him, but if I'm a mainstream American company I'm probably going to be a little leery. He's doing the right things now; he's saying, "Here's my target audience and here's where I need to focus my time and energy." But he reached about a billion eyeballs with the bad moves, and he might be reaching 50,000 eyeballs with the good moves. I don't think it's going to be enough to change the general perception.

Katie Paine
CEO
KDPaine and Partners
Berlin, New Hampshire

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