The Art of Getting Attention

Pushing the Envelope for Consumer Attention: Guerrilla Advertising 2
Today's successful advertising campaign has evolved well beyond the simple television product spot or the full page fashion spread – formulas we're sometimes so familiar with they almost disappear.

As pointed out in Guerrilla Advertising: Unconventional Brand Communication, Gavin Lucas illustrated that current marketing tools span all mediums and are so artfully crafted for their target audience, it's difficult to sort out what is advertising and what is not. 

The concept of guerrilla marketing (the term was coined and defined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his book Guerrilla Marketing) was invented as an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget.

The Lucas book – yellow, shiny and nicely designed – took a creative tweak and a guerrilla marketing clue when published in Japan in 2008. The hardback cover extended beyond the pages of the book to include cut-out carrier-bag style handles.

The agency responsible took pictures of people of all age groups and walks of life carrying the book around in fashionable parts of Tokyo, such as Ginza, Aoyama and Shibuya – creating a record of a guerrilla style campaign for the book itself.

Lucas' follow-up book, Guerrilla Advertising 2, published this year, revisits the subject, showing how effective unconventional branding and communication can be since the introduction of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the iPhone.

Lucas also highlights how the sheer definition of advertising is constantly shifting, saying "It is not just impossible to come up with a new advertising formula – it is now completely appropriate."

Gavin Lucas began collecting works to feature in the second volume in 2009. The resulting publication features more than 60 unusual campaigns from around the world, such as a giant inflatable pig stuck between two city buildings (for dental floss), a flash mob of dancers in a train station (for a cellphone service provider), and full-scale, high-resolution prints of museum artwork hung around city streets (for London's National Gallery) – showcasing non-traditional advertising and marketing campaigns from recent years.

A clever campaign illustrated in the book features a German employment website, with posters specifically designed to go on the sides of particular machines. On each poster is an image of a worker in a cramped space delivering the actual product being purchased – a woman with a washboard inside a washing machine, a banker crouched inside an ATM, a musician inside a jukebox, and shown here, a frozen worker squeezing out ice cream. The headline? “Life’s too short for the wrong job.”

It’s not the Mad Men's advertising environment anymore, pretty clearly. Those ads with simple brand messaging, are a fading, nostalgic memory.

Considered to be the first successful guerrilla marketing campaign, the iconoclastic Burma-Shave phenomenom from the 1920s-1930s, gives us a Lessons Learned case study on how to engage and captured public attention.

The new age of ad creative is exciting. As much as we hear about newer and faster technology, it’s interesting and fun to watch the creative revolution that is also underway.

Today's advertising is increasingly about engagement and interactivity - proven by the time tested and ROI validated Burma-Shave campaign phenomenom from generations ago. 
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A look at brand communication in the tech-advanced 21st century, Guerrilla Advertising 2 is a fun read for advertisers and the public alike. The book is available from Laurence King for $40.


Sources:
1. Laurence King Publishing, Guerrilla Advertising 2: More Unconventional Brand Communications
2. Creative Review, "Guerrilla Advertising 2: Call for entries," November 19, 2009
3. Creative Review, "Guerrilla Advertising on the streets of Tokyo," January 28, 2008
4. Visualizer, "Guerrilla Advertising 2 - The Art of Getting Attention," The Wall Street Journal, August 27, 2011