Guerrilla Marketing
May 14, 2009
My final project for Computer Illustration this year was to come up with a guerrilla marketing campaign and create visual examples of how it might look.
I believe guerrilla marketing is well suited to promoting subversive messages, so I decided to do a campaign advocating the legalization of marijuana. I could go on a long rant here about all the reasons the U.S. drug policy is idiotic but that’s really beyond the scope of this post. If you want to read about the topic, you can visit the NORML website.
My idea was to contradict some of the misinformation that exists about the drug with extreme contradictory examples. The concept was to create cardboard cutouts of various famous people who are known to have smoked marijuana and put labels on them that contradicted the obvious truth. These cutouts would then be placed in strategic locations for the most impact.
Stephen King appears in front of the NY Public Library:
Richard Branson in front of the NY Stock Exchange:
Barack Obama in front of the Supreme Court:
Michael Phelps coming out of a public swimming pool:
Each cutout would be accompanied not only by the pot logo but also a mug shot style reader board to make sure passersby would know who the person was, and why they were being labeled as pot smokers. As these are a little hard to read in the conceptual renderings, I’ve included larger versions of the signs:
