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

The mechanics of persuasion and advertising had been a subject of dinner-table conversation going back to his childhood. Both of his parents are historians whose work has dealt with media culture. I was particularly curious what his father made of Sam's chosen profession. After all, the senior Ewen's books -- Captains of Consciousness, All-Consuming Images and PR! A Social History of Spin among them -- are not exactly paeans to the ad game.

The obvious common ground between father and son is a fascination with the raw mechanics of persuasion. Both are also interested in fringe and subversive ("unofficial") expression -- street art, for instance -- and its potent power. Stuart says his "ambivalence" about marketing is less acute in his alt-marketer son's case, because Sam identifies with creative outsiders.

But what does Stuart make of it when a creative-outsider form such as street art is repurposed into slapping Le Tigre logos all over other companies' outdoor advertising, as an early Sam campaign did? "I think it sucks," he concedes. "But I also know it's always happened."

It should be noted that Ewen the professor has dabbled in publicity: He edited one of the first underground newspapers and creates graphics under the pseudonym Archie Bishop. His son's far bigger and more-complicated campaigns "walk the border," he says, bringing up the Boston campaign to promote the movie version of the Cartoon Network series Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Placing flashing light boxes around that city, in an "extra legal" manner, he suggests, used a "kind of creative mischief" to question who, exactly, controls public space. Boston authorities, he concludes, "decided to process it as an assault on public order" and created a crisis out of nothing.

It's an interesting critique. Then again, it wasn't social activists deploying "creative mischief" to raise questions. It was his son using creative mischief to sell movie tickets for the Turner corporate machine. That distinction matters -- doesn't it?

Sam Ewen knows perfectly well that when he talks about honesty, some will react with skepticism. But here, he says, is what he means. The Webby world is a more skeptical and connected place, where consumers are harder to dupe with the aspirational ads of the past. "This, to me, says to business: That's more reason to focus on your product, and have your product be what it needs to be -- and then give people ways to experience that product, to touch it, to see it, to talk about it." By, for example, getting Sony Ericsson phones into people's hands, or by turning Times Square into an open-air, immersive, and effectively unavoidable ad for GE products. Unlike most advertising, he says, it does not tell the consumer what to desire, but rather causes the consumer to generate his or her own desire. (After the event on August 26, GE's Klein told me it and an online promotion attracted more than 150,000 entrants to a washer/dryer giveaway contest.)

The best promotions, he continues, create delight in those who encounter them. People laugh and take pictures. Consider the event for a show about cavemen on the Discovery Channel. Ewen wondered, What would it look like if cavemen walked the streets today? His clients said: Go with that. "There's a lot of fun," he says. "Where do I buy $10,000 worth of remaindered animal pelts that I can turn into caveman costumes?" Not to mention finding the right prosthetics maker, training the promo people to communicate with gestures, and deploying them on subways and sidewalks and in upscale grocer Dean & DeLuca.

"We don't want advertising everywhere," he had said to me early on, but when I remind him of that, he puts the responsibility on city governments, which, he suggests, should have clearer and more consistent permitting rules. As for guys like him, "If I'm annoying people on behalf of a brand, then I'm not doing my job," he says. "You're not going to be able to avoid some people getting upset" -- mostly the "Ralph Naders of the world," or journalists like me. "But on the flip side," he continues, "you can create experiences that are positive enough, interesting enough, compelling enough that the overwhelming majority of people who are there appreciate it, and take it for what it is."

Later, Ewen sent me an email about a Target ad he'd seen with his 6-year-old daughter while watching the Olympics. His daughter loved the spot, featuring two college-age women dancing adorably to a catchy song. He searched for the song on YouTube, but the video that came up bordered (in his view) on soft-core porn.