You have to give credit to KFC for some terrific Guerrilla Marketing. I realize that GM is all about ‘substituting brains for money’ in the marketing wars but KFC used brains AND money in this.
To tackle households that are zapping their ads using TiVO or their DVRs, KFC ran an ad with a hidden message that could only be deciphered if you play it back in slow mo. If you could figure it out, you could then go to KFC’s website and get a coupon for a free sandwich. The traffic on their site went up by 40%. (BusinessWeek, April 17, 2006).
So they got people to watch their commercial (over and over again), boosted traffic on their website AND in their stores. I still think this example meets the test of what is (and is not) GM since you could look at it this way: How much money would they have had to spend in conventional marketing to get this kind of boost in terms of CPM (thousand pairs of eyeballs on their marketing message) and customers in their stores?
Dr. Bruce
April 18, 2006
That’s a great story on Guerrilla Marketing, but how did they get the word out that playing it back in slow-motion would give a message? (or was it obvious from the commercial?).
On the topic of Guerrilla Marketing, I was looking at the new show coming out in the fall that consists purely of entrepreneurs pitching their ideas to VCs; the exposure for the entrepreneurs (pitching their ideas on national TV) must be a great opportunity (even if the VCs don’t invest!), but I’m reading the updates on the show as they’re taping it (http://www.insidethedragonsden.com/) and I was just wondering if you might have any ideas of what these entrepreneurs could do to further take advantage of this huge exposure opportunity?