• by Ken Liebeskind , July 23, 2001

Guerilla marketing has been popular for years, but there may never have been an ad agency exclusively devoted to it.

Now there is Interference, a New York shop that recently launched. It has a strategic relationship with Merkely Newman Harty & Partners, a general agency with top name clients, including Mercedes, BMW Motorcycles and Citicorp.

Sam Ewen, CEO of Interference, was president of Eisnor Interactive, a promotional agency for the dot.com industry. He says dot-coms accelerated guerilla marketing, with a variety of in your face campaigns to promote new Web sites. The most memorable is probably Half.com's campaign to change the name of Half, OR to Half.com, OR, which it did for one year. Then there was Carorder.com's campaign that paid highway tolls for drivers. When About.com changed its name from Miningco.com in 1999 actors dressed in white with masks canvassed the streets of major cities asking, "Is anyone out there?"

Guerilla marketing can take many forms, from product sampling to actors and models personifying brands to signage, stickers and sandwich boards. Ewen notes that guerilla marketing is ideal for low budget advertisers who can't afford other forms of advertising, but he also says Fortune 500 companies use it to complement traditional campaigns.

"Television is passive and people tune it out," he says. "We do high impact high level with the consumer. We get in their faces and talk to them when they're ready to hear what we have to say."

Buying guerilla marketing is different from traditional advertising, with CPMs not used as much. "It's more about a desired goal," Ewen says, which isn't expressed in large numbers. It would be hard to buy guerilla marketing on a CPM basis, because you're dealing with smaller numbers of consumers. "The costs are higher than traditional CPMs because you target differently in distinct locations to distinct kinds of consumers," he says.

Among Interference's first clients are New York magazine and Motts Juices. Interference handed out free copies of New York outside of the Today Show, where huge crowds gather every day. It is giving out samples of Motts juices on New Jersey and Cape Cod beaches on hot days this summer.