Two years ago, Billy "Upski" Wimsatt, a New York activist, graffiti artist and author, combined all three of his titles by spray-painting the message "No More Prisons" - his brand, to use words he'd probably hate - on New York City sidewalks. The trick angered city officials, attracted press coverage and helped raise awareness of his independently published book about prisons, philanthropy and hip-hop.
Companies have been using marketing approaches like his for a while.
Hip-hop promoters like the L.A.-based Knight-Ridder Street Promotional Team get kids to talk up an act in exchange for concert tickets. The publicity-hungry college e-retailer Varsity.com went on the ground in 2000 by paying students to tell classmates about its services.
Pundits might call these efforts "word-of-mouth marketing," and word of mouth is certainly what they're trying to create. These strategies are also, at heart, a type of grassroots marketing, not dissimilar to sidewalk campaigns like Wimsatt's.
As with graffiti, the fact that the message come not from mass-media but from a source closer to home makes it more likely to be noticed. "Our campaign is all about the surprise effect. It's not as packaged and not as much of a sound bite," says Tamar Kraft-Stolar of Correction Associates, an organization that advocates relaxing New York State's drug laws. With Wimsatt's help, this summer the group launched a street-painting campaign ("Drop the Rock") similar to the "No More Prisons" campaign.
Corporations have long offered their own spins on grassroots marketing, and some are even trying a twist on the sidewalk-painting approach - literally and figuratively. Yet for all its appeal, the strategy can prove dangerous.
Just ask Universal Records. Lucinda Williams' new album, "Essence," got a strange marketing boost recently from Lost Highway Records, the Universal-owned label. The company promised to enter fans in a contest to win free concert tickets, but only if they started 10 online discussions about Williams and sent a Williams e-card to someone. It's hard to imagine even the more commercially inclined Christina Aguilera fans going for the ploy, and Williams' fans - who skew in the opposite direction - really had a laugh. The campaign quickly became a punch line on country-rock newsgroups.
Big Blue also got tangled up in the grassroots movement. To promote a new Linux-based workstation in April, the company marked the Linux penguin and other symbols onto San Francisco sidewalks. IBM maintained that the symbols were biodegradable, but the city said they violated regulations on printing anything on city sidewalks, and local officials and the press immediately rained on the campaign for vandalizing neighborhoods. IBM dropped it shortly after.
The lesson from Universal is pretty clear: You can't always orchestrate spontaneity. The few suckers you might reel in with it aren't worth the price. IBM's situation, though, is more complicated. On paper, the company's marketers did everything right. They matched message and method (who better to appreciate a guerilla technique than open-source programmers?). Then they found the right venue - a tech-savvy city that slouches left, presumably toward open source.
So what went wrong? Well, IBM, for all its replication of the "No More Prisons" approach, seems to have misunderstood Wimsatt's strategy. The strength of "No More Prisons" was that within weeks after Wimsatt pointed his first spray-paint can, graffiti artists from Vancouver to Washington, D.C., picked up their own and began spreading his message for him. Wimsatt's campaign didn't just throw down the seeds of grassroots marketing; it planted little saplings of activism. The strategy didn't just talk at people, it got them involved.
Sure, the IBM campaign drew some free press for the company, but hardly of the meaningful kind. Most of the articles covered the vandalism controversy; few of them hashed out the virtues of open source.
In the upcoming book "Gonzo Marketing," author Christopher Locke elaborates on his belief that the best marketing comes from conversations. People love Amazon, not because the company can recommend records with pinhead accuracy (which it can't),
