Guerrilla Advertising

Over the past week, I began seeing certain parts of the media where you wouldn’t expect to. Specifically, I saw advertisements in areas I wasn’t expecting. There were two specific instances that come to mind. First, when I was using the restroom in a public bathroom, I looked up and there was an ad. Its not something one really expects to see while using the restroom. The next example that comes to mind is that when I went ice skating on Friday, there was a RT logo beneath the ice. Once again, one doesn’t really expect to look down and see a logo for a company underneath ice, and it definitely does put that company in the back of your mind. This form of advertisement is becoming more and more common, with ads appearing everywhere. This advertisement is called guerilla advertising.

Guerilla advertising is essentially putting ads for a company in every public spot available to put an ad in. This means advertising on the actual pavement of the street, public buildings and even advertising within other ads. Guerrilla advertising can also include advertising stunts performed by companies to promote their product. For example, Red Bull performed a stunt where they had a skydiver break the world record for the highest sky dive. The company immediately gained a lot of publicity from this one stunt, even though the actual ad had nothing to do with what Red Bull actually creates. This kind of advertising can be very beneficial to the companies that do it, and certainly do put an association of certain things with these companies in the back of your mind. Guerrilla advertising first officially began in 1984, with a book published on the subject. Back then, however, this form of advertising was typically used with local businesses or small companies that didn’t have enough money to match the ads larger companies put out. In recent years, large companies are using this kind of advertisement more and more. Most studies believe that this type of advertising can be several times more beneficial then most other advertising.

However, for all the good this advertising creates for the companies, it is generally bad for the consumers. This is because with advertising becoming more and more of a regularity in our society and increasing in where advertising is acceptable, we lose a bit of our culture. Once a society is completely open to advertising, it ceases to be a culture. With guerrilla advertising pushing the boundary of what is acceptable every day, we lose a little part of our culture to advertising every day. Furthermore, this guerrilla advertising can push susceptible consumers to buy even more products that they don’t necessarily need. This in turn pushes the company to assume that this marketing scheme worked and that they should therefore try the marketing scheme again or something different but still similar and pushing the boundary. Once again, this same consumer will look at a slightly changed product and assume that he or she needs it again, buying that same product. This creates a double negative spiral. The first spiral is that advertising boundaries continue to be pushed by the companies and accepted by consumers, chipping away at our culture. The second spiral is that this advertising pushes companies to spend more money in marketing rather than the actual product they are selling, leading to a lackluster product as compared to the ad. Overall, guerrilla advertising is a good scheme for companies when used with control, but has been taken too far in today’s society.