Meet America’s Top Guerilla Marketer

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Wash Day: A GE event in August featured 800 feet of clothesline and 20-foot-high inflatable versions of the company's new washer/dryer. | photograph by Michael Schmelling

Street Theater: For the Discovery Channel, Interference sent "cavemen" into the subway in SoHo and "lifeguards" onto Manhattan sidewalks | courtesy of Interference

Like everybody else in America, Sam Ewen gets sick of marketing. "I grew up in a household that was very critical of advertising," he says. This is interesting only because of who Ewen is. We're talking in the room where his 14-person company, Interference Inc., stores the props, costumes, and supplies used in its various street-theater promotional efforts. A table is strewn with garments to be used as part of a stunt in Times Square that Interference has devised for its client General Electric. That is to say, Ewen is a marketer.

Specifically, he is a "nontraditional" (or alternative, or guerrilla, or whatever you want to call it) marketer. When Ewen, now 39, founded Interference eight years ago, he says, corporations didn't have a budget line item for branding efforts that didn't fit into long-standing categories like television, print, or billboards. But today, practically everybody agrees that there's value in marketing forms that consumers can't click away from. According to PQ Media, "alternative media" accounted for 16% of all marketing expenditures in 2007, double the figure in 2002.

Yet these efforts can boomerang, annoying potential customers and attracting the ire of consumer watchdogs or the media. Remember the Sony Ericsson "stealth" campaign that deployed actors to pose as tourists asking strangers to take their picture with a newfangled camera phone? It ended up in an alarmist report on 60 Minutes. Interference was part of that effort. Then there was the time Boston was shut down by fear of flashing devices that authorities thought might have been the work of terrorists, but were actually just ad pieces (albeit illegally placed) promoting a movie. This, too, was Interference's work.

Experience with such disruptive, if attention-getting, efforts makes Ewen the ideal person to address the most confounding issue about his business: Every new tactic for breaking through marketing clutter contributes to marketing clutter, which raises the stakes on innovating new tactics -- which adds to the clutter. And Ewen stands apart from his peers for more than his notoriety. Unlike many alt marketers, he talks about working in concert with traditional advertising, not destroying it, and he puts his work in the context of figures like Edward Bernays, a founder of the public-relations field more often named-dropped by cultural historians than by ad pros. Plus, Ewen's father, Stuart, is a professor at Hunter College and City University of New York whose scholarship has been highly critical of the commercial persuasion industry.

So here we are, talking about marketing in a marketing-soaked culture. "I actually look at a lot of traditional advertising," Ewen says, "and so much of it is sold on a promise of what kind of person those tires -- or whatever -- are going to make you be. Not about what those tires do." Products sold by suggesting that they will make you rich and sexy, "all of that stuff is bullshit," he continues. And then he says something that anybody familiar with the fake Sony Ericsson tourists or the Boston fiasco is probably going to find hard to swallow: "I believe that the new killer app in advertising is honesty."

If it's surprising that a huge company like GE, not exactly known for wild risk taking, is working with Interference, it may be even more surprising to learn that the stunt that Ewen was preparing for when we met was on behalf of ... a washing machine. Usually, the tactics associated with guerrilla marketing get deployed on behalf of alcohol, energy drinks, movies -- trendy stuff for younger consumers. Not appliances. "A lot of people would look at that and say, 'That's not terribly sexy,' " Ewen concedes.

But Interference essentially bills itself as being able to engage consumer groups appropriate to any product. The primary attraction of the GE Profile front-load washer/dryer, says Paul Klein, general manager for brand and advertising for the company's industrial and consumer division, is SmartDispense technology; basically, you can load it with an entire bottle of detergent, punch in various settings (whether your water is hard or soft, and so on), and the machine doles out the correct amount for each load. This combination of convenience and efficiency, plus snazzy design, will run you $3,500. "It's a huge launch," Klein continues. Ad agency BBDO devised the regular-media campaign for parenting magazines and the like, and television commercials and online ads. But Klein also wanted something on the street to generate publicity and buzz. "I'm always looking" for something different, he says; to reach the ad-inundated consumer, "you've got to be."