More and more we’re getting familiar with guerilla advertising. These are advertising actions that go beyond the media and bring commercial statements into real life.

We all saw various examples online like flashmobs, untraditional billboards and the usage of the urban environment for publicity.

But today I was stunned by a new phenomenon. In the Netherlands there is a t.v. commercial about a girl that lost her phone. This commercial is now also shown in movie theaters. But in this youtube video you’ll find a great new kind of guerilla marketing. The visitors of this movie theater watched the commercial on the movie screen before this happens:

I am not loved. At least, not by a bunch of co-workers and some management team-members at one of the companies I give marketing advise to. Why? Because I don’t tell them what they want to hear.

As a marketeer, I believe in a new approach towards promoting a product or service, or a company. I can only market what exist. Or better stated: That is the only thing I WANT. I don’t believe in building hollow stories around products or services without having the opportunity to explore authentic elements.

I know how to get a product or company in the news, bring it to consumer’s attention, make it look desireable etc. That is not the challenge. Discovering the story is, and unveiling it.

I want to unveil what a product or company inhibits. Not building another copied story. And because most people are afraid of the truth, or only want to believe what they have in mind, they rather see me going than coming. (For comparison: Just look at the reactions of people when they look at photo’s of themselves, almost never satisfied).

My aim in live is enhancement. I am fed up with building just another story, for just another company or brand, that in essence has nothing to tell, but wishes to build a facade that matches the consumer’s false needs or follows the footsteps of a competitor.

If we keep doing that, we will never create space for innovation, but we keep repeating, repeating, repeating…

Media planners use a wide range of media to send their message to the consumer. For me that’s a multimedia campaign. But just today I heared someone talking about a big advertisement campaign as if it was a crossmedia campaigns because it used a paper ad, an online banner and a television commercial. It’s not the first time I’ve noticed that It irritated me that people use multimedia and corssmedia as if it’s all the same. That remembered me that I ‘ve ordered ‘Basisboek Corssmedia Concepting’(in Dutch) a while ago and I was meaning to tell you on Klatergoud.com about it.

‘Crossmedia Concepting’ is the kind of book you want to put in your closet to use once in a while as an information and inspiration source. The book is written as a learning book for marketing students and teachers so you can’t ready as a big story or essay on crossmedia. But still for new media and marketing interested people it’s a great book for theoretical and practical info on crossmedia. The writers, Indira Reynaert and Daphne Dijkerman, gathered a lot of practical and theoretical examples in the years.

With their own blog (also a great information source on crossmedia), blogs from other crossmedia experts, twitter message, slideshare and many other online resources they made a first step towards a crossmedia bible. You’ll find a lot of interesting people and cases on crossmedia. Hopefully this book will make a lot of people see that crossmedia is more than just using different kinds of media and that it’s about storytelling, being medium specific, usability, relevance and co-creation.

As we recently witnessed in last couple of years, the majority of new ventures arose in the area of the Internet, the health sector or in the software industry. It would be a misconception to believe these are the only areas where true opportunity exists. In fact, business opportunities exist everywhere, as they did in the past, the trick is recognizing them and using imagination and innovation to realize this potential.

Nobody would have predicted the success of Starbucks, IKEA or Zara. They are creatively designed and intelligently executed ordinary businesses that became – because of their owners’ entrepreneurially intense mindset – extraordinary exemplars of well-expressed imagination in a field of mediocre competitors.

The biggest opportunity lies in creating a company that does something that traditional commodity businesses don’t do nearly as well, for a market that has grown tired of the status quo. An entrepreneur must spot the weakness and improve upon it in such a significant way that a brand is born. This new brand will become preferentially unique because it delivers results better, faster, cheaper and most important nowadays -more ‘socially- and globally minded’ than anyone else.

The story of the Socially- and Globally-Minded Entrepreneurs.

The concept isn’t new. What is new, is that today’s entrepreneurs have adopted a fresh view of the world that empowers them to take on problems traditionally outside the business milieu. Because entrepreneurs possess the imagination, innovation, passion and skill to produce results, they are often more efficient than governments, charities, religious institutions and other not-for-profit organizations that have historically been responsible for proposing solutions.

Muhammad Yunis’ Grameen Bank

A 2006 Nobel Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, a 67-year-old Ph.D in Economics.
Yunus set up The Grameen Bank, worlds’ first microcredit bank in 1976 with just $27 from his own pocket. More than 30 years later, the bank has 6.6 million borrowers, of which 97% are women. “Just enough capital” was a catchphrase that preceded today’s usage of the term now coined “micro-lending.” This notion inspired a transformational movement that now translated this vision into practical action for millions of workers in more than 100 countries.

Yunus tackled the problem of poverty the way any entrepreneur would, by laying bare the root of the problem and innovating solutions to overcome these core obstacles. Financial, political, religious and familial restrictions prevented these Bangladeshi women from running self-sufficient businesses that would produce the income they and their children needed. These deterrents appeared crippling at first, but they could be alleviated by the injection of small amounts of cash loaned on terms acceptable to them. Remarkably, 96% of these loans are repaid.

Yunus is a perfect exemplar of the New Entrepreneur, an individual who doesn’t look for traditional opportunities that suggest only personal gain, but rather who applies business sense to global problems for collective gain. And good news: his successful business model is nowadays being supported by existing multinationals like DANONE (dairy products) and Evian (mineral water). As they are setting up businesses in developing countries according to the Yunus dogma. “What a wonderful world”…

Alfredo Silva is a freelance marketing & communication consultant. Contact Alfredo: alfredo@klatergoud.com

Yunus on new opportunities:

We’ve billed Klatergoud.com as a ‘platform for new marketing thinking’, not because we think we know what new marketing is, but rather because we think there’s no one singular definition and want to mix and match ideas. So last night, looking for answers, we were out to 212 Amsterdam, a free event hosted at Felix Meritis, where Bram Alkema (who?) was going to explain to all of us what new marketing is.

UH-OH.

Bram’s representation uses words like ‘unorthodox’ to describe him, I’d like to use the words ‘full of shit’. While we did not learn what new marketing is, he let us in on the big secret that Google and Apple are good at it. Fuck, he reads the same blogs that we do. Too bad it took an hour of ‘introduction’ into the history of marketing (FYI, everyone in the audience was a marketing professional) to come to this remarkable insight. Luckly a fine gentleman that actually had some fresh ideas sort of saved the day by explaining to us the findings of research he had been doing. Quite interesting, as the Brits say.

Well now, all of that was just a long-winded introduction to the following. If new marketing is less tangible than the old one, and if said companies (Google, Apple, Amazon, the usual suspects) are good at it, then what do YOU think it’s all about? What do new marketers do different and/or better than they used to?

Let loose in the comments. Please use a lot of Seth Godin quotes.

PS. If you were there, I’m sorry to have misbehaved. It’s just a reaction I have to hearing so many isms cramped in too much hot air.

Inspired by this nugget from Mark Earls / Hugh Macleod, new marketing in 11 words:

The real draw is probably not the brand but… other people”

the metaphor of the string just popped into my head. Bottom line: if you’re holding a string, trying to push it out is going to get you nowhere. Maybe do something that will make the other side pull it. Seems to illustrate new marketing thinking well. For me at least. It’s about engagement.