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

Here, then, it seemed was an example of marketing that annoyed him as a consumer. I tried to pursue the societal-fallout angle with him. Had the advertiser put him in an awkward position and irritated him as the parent of a young girl? But Ewen seemed much more engaged in the brand fallout: "What does that say about the brand, especially a family brand like Target?" Should the retailer's marketers have examined this contingency and thought twice about how a disgruntled parent might react? He wasn't disingenuously deflecting criticism. After all, he'd had nothing to do with this ad, and he'd brought it to my attention.

I finally realized he was not being evasive about the big picture; he is just really, authentically, engaged with the puzzle of brand meaning. Sure, he's the subculture sponge his father admires, scouring the fringes for creative ideas. But his personal creative payoff is figuring out how to deploy such expression on behalf of a brand.

The answers that Ewen had been giving me all along weren't slick evasions. They were perfectly honest. Sure, all that marketing clutter is annoying and makes it harder for any given branding idea to break through. But to Ewen, that's not really a downside of being a part of the marketing business. That's precisely what he loves about it.

Rob Walker's new book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, was excerpted in the June issue of Fast Company.