Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing

Appendix

>> 171 Appendix The excellent works of Thomas Lindlof, Pertti Alasuutari, and Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson, among others, inform my methodological training .1 I have approached this research with the exploratory, inductive posture they advocate: collecting bits and pieces of observation—whether found in press coverage or heard in interviews—and comparing, contrasting, and connecting to “funnel” an emerging mass of raw data into an integrated understanding of the phenomena at hand while achieving abstracted answers to my primary research questions. As I reviewed press coverage and prepared semi-structured interview schedules, these works have served as my compass points via “many iterations of tacking between the cases and the general cultural theories that informed this research to search for patterns.”2 The popular and trade press served as an overview entry point for the project—offering coverage of the phenomena of guerrilla marketing that provided examples (which I then pursued further through interviews) as well as necessary background for getting a sense of public discourse about the practice . Whereas articles on guerrilla advertising in the popular press naturally speak to a wider audience and explain the work in nonspecialist terms, coverage in the trade press offers greater depth for the industry community in addition to more substantive insight and potential contacts for my purposes. I used the Factiva online database to generate a corpus of articles on guerrilla marketing, limiting the database search to the past ten years. My rationale for choosing the first decade of the 21st century as the time frame for analysis was deliberate in that by 2000, Internet usage had spread to almost half of the United States; prophecies of traditional advertising’s “death” had grown louder in scholarly journals and trade texts while “interactive” panaceas began to be heralded with similar volume; older media institutions like newspapers, magazines, terrestrial radio, and broadcast television stood on the precipice of a tumultuous era; and advertising dollars began sloshing into newer venues at a greater pace. At a moment when these and other relevant trends were in motion, the start of a new century provided a convenient moment to consider guerrilla marketing practices and prospects. Moreover, the close of 2009 brought its own useful flurry of decade-in-retrospective coverage in the press from which I could amass avenues for further inquiry. 172 > 173 Noah Brier; trade journalists like Becky Ebenkamp, who regularly covered guerrilla marketing for Brandweek, and Scott Donaton, the former editor of Advertising Age; and storytellers and content creators like the author Karin Slaughter, the film producer Mike Monello, and the game designer Jordan Weisman—all of whom brought to bear their own particular lens on guerrilla advertising. Between the fall of 2008 and the spring of 2010, I carried out some fortysix interviews with forty-eight interviewees (out of ninety-three attempted contacts)—some as short as twenty minutes, some as long as more than an hour, but generally lasting about forty minutes each (a list with descriptions of the name, job title, and date of the interview follows). While longer interviews might certainly have been preferable, given the busy schedules of my interviewees (more than a handful were company CEOs), I appreciated any opportunity to speak with them; moreover, for many, we had pretty well exhausted the topic by the time their availability ran out. I had initially hoped to use a snowball sample as much as possible—“cold calling” interviewees by phone or through e-mail when necessary but also relying on early contacts to put me in touch with more informants. As it turned out, the bulk of contacts were in fact made through that cold-calling approach, as few interviewees provided much in the way of suggestion of other contacts, the product, I suspect , of my asking about what are, in effect, industry competitors. Although research often understandably anonymizes participants out of habit, I have—unless requested otherwise by interviewees (and none did so)—used their real names here. I had three reasons for doing that: First, any attempt at rendering them anonymous was, in reality, a flimsy measure of protection. These interviewees were being contacted because most are highlevel creative decision-makers involved in very specific and prominent campaigns and more often than not I got their names from quotes in the popular and trade press (i.e., they are already in the public eye). To refer anonymously to, for example, “the creative director behind XYZ campaign” does not really offer much in the way of anonymity, when...