Case 3 brought to my attention Ambush Marketing, an interesting and relevant topic with respect to the various major sporting events that have occurred in the past year. By its nature, ambush marketing can take on many different forms and faces, but at its foundation, it involves a company associating its brand with an event without paying sponsorship dollars for the association.
Some amusing guerilla marketing from FedEx
Related to ambush marketing but slightly different is Guerilla Marketing, which involves the use of unconventional and often stealthy campaigns capitalizing on “time, energy and imagination”. Since guerilla marketing and social media pretty much go together like Dell and UPS, it’s not surprising that it’s found its way onto Twitter. Hey, if it worked for Obama…
A couple days ago, a company bought promoted tweet hashtags #apple, #mac, and #macbook – but it wasn’t Apple. Hewlett-Packard did some sneaky guerilla marketing on Twitter by buying the hashtags and then linking the tweet to its online computers store. The article states that it’s an old marketing tactic, but I was personally surprised to learn this was occurring on Twitter.
HP hasn’t been the only company to use Twitter as an advertising war platform – Google and Microsoft went head-to-head with simultaneous promoted tweets a couple weeks ago too. It’s easy to see why guerilla marketing is so well supported by social media: when a campaign is successful or buzz-worthy, it can be widely discussed and spread via social media, thus further amplifying the campaign’s triumph.
While social media is still in its relative infancy, it will be interesting to see how far marketers push the envelope in social media for their campaigns. With any luck, one day it’ll be me creating and carrying them out 😀
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