Guerrilla Marketing—Using Humans as Billboards

Guerrilla Marketing—Using Humans as Billboards

You have to wonder about GM like this. First of all, no one spends $37,375 USD to rent a guy's forehead for one month based on the CPM (Cost per thousand pairs of eyeballs) that will see the ad directly.

Obviously, the company paid this because they knew they would get a picture of this person in all sorts of major media like the attached Ottawa Citizen article.

Typical CPM costs are usually $5 to $40 per thousand depending on the type of advertising you do. For example, let's say you put a display ad in the Ottawa Citizen for $2,500 and it's seen potentially by 150,000 readers, your CPM is $16.67 ($2,500/150).

In this case, if this guy is looked at by 1000 people in the month that he is wearing this ad, the CPM is a prohibitive $373,750 so obviously they were counting on the novelty to create earned media for them.

As my friend Barry McLaughlin (one of Canada's leading media trainers has said) you can reach more people in 7 seconds on the nightly newscast than you can if you make a speech every night for a year to 1,000 people per day.

So earned media is important but there is also the question of whether using human billboards (permanent tattoos, painted bodies running around at major sporting events, etc.) is the right way to go about getting some earned media. This could also be reverse marketing if you are not careful.

http://www.dramatispersonae.org/GuerrillaMarketingAndFinance/GuerrillaMarketing.htm

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