By the sea, you mostly think about people, pedicure, skin, sand, seaweed, tennis balls and of course you try to make a link between innovation, start-ups and their connection with guerilla marketing.
what? you don’t? come on, you are not even geek enough …

Keyword of this head-on-the-sand brainstorming : Guerrilla Marketing
Always very impressive.
Knitting sockets for street-lamps, waking up your co-citizens,  or printing you “tete” (head) on the floor out of the metro to sell records or ray ban glasses…. ah ! fascinating – respect for the brand / checked . prescription circle short-circuited and the brand needs a promotion to an icon.
I had kind of forgotten of this silly risky stuff going back to my mentally safe and rigid country-cocoon. Until a few days ago I stumbled over a campaign made for Media Markt from Leo Burnett that is actually a guerrilla marketing study-case. click it!
Media Markt Junkmen.
In two words the guys used an ancient  hoaxing mechanism for the real world and attempted to turn it into a sales channel. Actually  since it had a guerilla conotation the guys just tested reactions without really managing the channel. And of course they raised comments, digs and lifted eyebrows in various shapes.

Doesn’t advertising need it’s own R&D space? Second life what? Real life needed… To my attention, there are no real start-ups in the advertising space (end-to-end) so this risk had to be integrated into a big corporation’s structure like Leo Burnett. (ok maybe there are, but that’s another post)

Three comments from my side.
one : they and us have to get used to it, interactivity is here.
two : guerrilla has the same connotation as innovation, as for now (this is why geeks like that stuff)

three : next week, the time I hold my breath underwater I am going to take this further — How do you turn  guerrilla heroes and heroism into sustainable business and transform surprise to respect from the mass and their structured values ?

some of your good ideas might help me … breathe better

Georgia

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Hello la’ys & gtnlmen,

summer is here (!) and so are various risks associated with UV, swimming, pool-walking, heat, diet, etc.

Did you ever think how knitting could be dangerous for you? Ok, it may be quite weird to consider knitting during summer, unless you are a doily enthusiast or just want to make a personal gift to Jeremy’s artist elephant (an elephant-sweatshirt takes some time)

Think twice before picking up your needles, think about Mazz…

Mazzmatazz, a Dr Who fan with a talent for knitting, published photos and pattern directions of Ood and Adipose, on which BBC Wordwide had copyrights,since they are Dr Who characters. This got her an email in her inbox alerting her on the legal consequences of this act.

Mazzmatazz removed these elements from her website and searched for support from the Open Rights Group on this intriguing situation. It’s not everyday that you risk legal prosecution for buying into a brand symbol.

Is this an exaggerated situation indeed ?

I would say it is, since it interprates the motivation : the “Mazz did nothing more than contrefacon” attitude reduces the creative transformation process to a simple copying reflex.

Then, it sets a miserable legal granularity that drives semiotic diversity to extinction. If nobody can speak, sing, sketch, imitate moves of Adipose without buying copyrights beforehand, then Adipose will not fertilize any other ideas, and will be a symbol quickly forgotten. Save fat !

but wait,

Do we actually have somebody playing tennis in the swimming pool? eh, I mean mixing up the rules of two different business models: If BBC Worldwide is getting royalties from the brand and paraphernalia, it seems to me that Mazzmatazz did not monetize this artwork by selling it directly. If she goes for indirect revenue generation (let’s say from traffic on her site, or publicity, or from boosting her productivity by having a fulfilling hobby, or whatever), let her play on her field. Or else, BBC is bullying “we are competitors, either you like it or not”.

On the other hand, BBC Worldwide, may have needed some field exercises on applied IP law on digital content (mesure the image impact, the propagation speed, the volatility of its arguments). Fair,because when a real crisis is in, I suppose it will be too late to test the legal function.

Or maybe they are doing some buzz about the new cycle of Dr Who series. Knitting is a rather cult activity, exactly like the audience of Dr Who.

Anyway, just in case you got as impressed as I were by this story, remember not to facebook any monument-like castles your cousins built on sand this summer. And let’s hope that this IP hot stream will begin to settle down until Halloween / carnival because I want to pose with my Pink Panther costume. Tara rara, rara…

Georgia

( for a more in-depth legal analysis on the issue, see Andres Guadamuz content, enjoy)

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