Technique
Guerrilla and ambient
Unconventional, surprising placements in the real world: street interventions, ambient media and hijacked spaces.
2020s
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2021The Unfiltered History Tour
Runs an unofficial tour inside the British Museum without its permission, using visitors' phones to annotate someone else's galleries.
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2020Shutter Ads
Roll-down shutters, windows and facades of closed venues become poster sites, making the dark bars themselves both the medium and the message.
2010s
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Order a Whopper for a penny — at McDonald's.Burger King2018
Whopper Detour
Geofencing more than 14,000 rival restaurants turns a competitor's own real estate into the trigger for Burger King's promotion.
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2018Paving for Pizza
Stencils the brand onto repaired asphalt, so each patched street becomes a local billboard and a local news story.
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Know the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference.State Street Global Advisors2017
Fearless Girl
Installs a bronze girl overnight, staring down Wall Street's Charging Bull with no media buy, so a single object becomes the campaign.
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2015Brewtroleum
Uses petrol pumps as ambient media, with the beer's own fuel on sale at stations and a flagship forecourt.
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2015Holograms for Freedom
Projects the protest outside the Congress of Deputies at night under a film-shoot permit, turning the restriction itself into the message.
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2014GAYTMs
Ordinary street cash machines are dressed in rhinestones, studs and fur, turning the bank's own hardware into outdoor media people use and photograph.
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2014Nazis Against Nazis ("Rechts gegen Rechts")
Dresses a neo-Nazi march route as a sponsored charity walk, with start and finish lines and banners, on a tiny budget.
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2013Telekinetic Coffee Shop Surprise
A New York coffee shop is secretly rigged with a false wall, remote-controlled furniture and spring-loaded books, turning an everyday space into a film set.
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2013Roti Reminder
Heat-stamps the handwashing question onto rotis served at festival eateries, a medium nobody can skip.
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2012A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square ("Push to Add Drama")
Stages a rapid chain of mayhem in a quiet market square, from an ambulance to a shoot-out, before a banner unrolls.
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2012Bridge of Life
Turns the guardrails of a public bridge into the medium, with sensors lighting up messages as pedestrians walk past.
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2012The Invisible Drive
Drives the seemingly see-through car through city streets, letting passers-by and then online viewers encounter the uncanny sight.
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2010Happiness Machine
A rigged vending machine is slipped into a university cafeteria overnight and filmed by hidden cameras, turning an everyday spot into a surprise.
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2010Dutch Dress
Ambushes the World Cup with an almost unbranded orange dress, so the heavy-handed ejections become a worldwide story.
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2010Operation Christmas
Places motion-triggered lit trees in FARC-controlled jungle and along guerrilla routes, taking advertising behind the lines of a civil war.
2000s
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2009The Fun Theory ("Piano Stairs")
Subway stairs in Stockholm are turned into working piano keys and filmed as commuters abandon the escalator, a playful real-world intervention.
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2009The Trillion Dollar Campaign
Banknotes become flyers, posters, murals and billboards, an unconventional medium that is literally cheaper than paper.
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2009Dance (Life's for Sharing)
Hides hundreds of dancers in a rush-hour station crowd, turning a commuter concourse into a surprise performance filmed for television.
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2009Teletransporter
Places soundproof booths inside bars, so the medium is used at the very moment the beer is being drunk.
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2007Why So Serious? (The Dark Knight alternate reality game)
Joker cards in comic shops, phones baked into cakes and real-world scavenger hunts carry the game off the screen into surprising physical places.
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2006Sundial
Built near Wrigley Field with no screens or sensors, only geometry, the board turns a static street poster into a working sundial passers-by can check daily.
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Vertical Footballadidas2003
Vertical Football
Turns a billboard into a live pitch, with two real players competing on ropes high above the street as crowds gather.
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Let's Motor.MINI USA (BMW Group)2002
Let's Motor (MINI USA launch)
Real cars mounted on top of SUVs and other street placements launch the brand without the usual television spend.
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PiercingOslo Piercing Studio2001
Piercing
Fly-posted close-ups of body parts are pasted so that nails and fixtures already on the walls poke through exactly where a piercing would sit.
1930s
1920s
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Torches of FreedomLucky Strike (American Tobacco Company)1929
Torches of Freedom
Plants women lighting cigarettes in the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue so the stunt reads as news rather than advertising.
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Within this vale / of toil / and sin / your head grows bald / but not your chin — Burma-ShaveBurma-Shave1925
Burma-Shave Roadside Verses
Small signs planted along highways, each carrying one line paced to a passing car, invent a medium out of the roadside.
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1925Citroën on the Eiffel Tower
Turns a city landmark into an animated light sign, a surprising placement that some Paris papers attack as a disfigurement.
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1925The Goodyear Blimp
Turns an airship into an airborne billboard over cities, and later into a camera platform that floats the name into live broadcasts.
1890s
Guerrilla and ambient: how it works
Guerrilla marketing uses surprise and unconventional placement to get noticed, often on a small budget: an object in the street, a message in an unexpected place, or an everyday space turned into an ad. Ambient advertising is the same idea applied to the environment around people.
How to spot it
- The ad appears somewhere ads don't normally go, or uses its surroundings as part of the idea.
- It is designed to be photographed, filmed and shared.
- It often trades media spend for ingenuity.
Why it works
Surprise breaks through habits of ignoring advertising, and a clever intervention gets far more attention online than it does on the street. The examples below show how each one used its location as part of the message.