Hasta La Creative!

This weekend hoping to enlist PGA Tour golfers as brand ambassadors, BMW of North America, with help from Raleigh-based agency Baldwin& (no, that’s not a typo), will affix posters above the beds in the Crooked Stick Golf Club in Carmel, IN that show the front grill and logo of the BMW M.

When golfers turn out the lights for the night, the vehicle’s headlights will glow and a headline will appear. It reads, “Don’t count sheep. Count RPMs” followed by copy which reads, “To reserve your spot at the BMW M driving experience, visit the BMW hospitality concierge.”

If golfers turn on the and turn to the hotel’s relaxation channel, they will be met by soothing sounds of the BMW M and an image of the car’s dashboard along with a headline that reads, “You are now entering RPM?sleep. This audio experience has been designed by BMW?to help you fall asleep as fast as possible. Because Thursday is the players-only BMW?Track Day. And yawning at 100 mph is not very aerodynamic. See you on the track.”

Golfers who elect to attend BMW Track Day, will get to take an M car through a closed Indianapolis Motor Speedway racecourse.

The intention, of course, is to get these influential golfers into the vehicles so that, while they may not buy, they’ll certainly regale the experience to their equally wealthy friends.

This just goes to show if you hand a person a mic, they’ll get in front of a crowd and make a fool of themselves. Or in this case, get themselves into a cheesy eHarmony ad. Conscious Minds grabbed a piano, a song book and a camera crew and headed to 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica to capture random people professing their love to one another. Of course now, it’s a YouTube video.

So this has been out for a while but it is too good not to share. Thailand’s ThaiHealth enlisted kids to ask adults (some of which look like kids themselves) for a light for their cigarette. All the adults declined and proceeded to lecture the kids on why smoking is bad. The kids then asked,” why do you smoke?”, and handed the adults a brochure.

While enlisting kids to help in an effort like this is both questionable and brilliant, one this is clear; the campaign worked. After their encounter with the kids, adults put their cigarettes out and ThaiHealth saw a 40 percent increase in inquiries from smokers who wanted to quit.

We have to agree with AdWeek’s David Gianatasio on this one. To “demonstrate the precision and control of the new Volvo FH series truck,” Swedish ad agency Forsman & Bodenfors set up a slacklining stunt whereby slickliner Faith Dickey would walk a tightrope between two moving trucks approaching tunnels.

As with other stunts similar to this that attempt to illustrate the superiority of a machine or vehicle, as Gianatasio argues, it’s really the skill of the operator as opposed to the technical precision of the machine that truly matters. Volvo could have grabbed two 20 year old 18 wheelers, a pair of great stunt drivers and accomplished the same thing.

Sure, this stunt is fun to watch but does it really demonstrate the capability of the vehicle? We’d buy into this more if Volvo had hired two overweight, beer gut-sporting slobs who’d just each downed a six pack and put them behind the wheel of a vehicle that actually could maneuver itself through the use of a sophisticated computer-aided guidance system.

Of course we take nothing away from Dickey’s accomplishment here. As she says in the video, she’s done a lot of slacklining but never before between two moving trucks. SO there’s that.

As part of its ongoing negotiations with Dish Network which dumped the network from its lineup, AMC has unleashed real-life Walking Dead zombies in New York City posing as EMTs, street workers, cops, pedestrians and hot dog vendors. Needless to say, the stunt scared the crap out of people but also brought a few laughs.

The stunt is part of PutZombiesBack, an online effort to get the net back on Dish. ON the site, a statements reads, “We know Dish has been urging AMC fans to pay additional monies to see their favorite shows online. It seems unusual to us for a television provider to ask their subscribers to pay extra money to see the same shows that they are already paying for, and that their neighbors are getting, as part of their basic TV subscriptions.”

The video, which shows just how the stunt was pulled off and crowd reaction to it, closes with “Zombies don’t belong here. Put them back on TV.”

Aggressive. But brilliant.

OK so not real cows but a bunch of humans – dance troupe Boadicea, dressed as cows getting their groove on at London’s King’s Cross Station.

It’s always amusing to see how far people will go to get something for free. Or, more accurately, what they’re willing to do in public in response to a marketers guerrilla shenanigans.

Last week San Francisco residents passing through Justin Herman Plaza today got a bit of a surprise.

We’re quite positive we’ve never before heard Old MacDonald’s Farm used as a method for explaining how a guerrilla marketing stunt was performed but we have to admit it works in this case.

Check out this speech given by Union of European Football Association President Michael Platini on the topic of guerrilla marketing during championship games.