posterGIANT took over a block on 5th Avenue in New York City for the launch of NYFW in 2017 to showcase Farrow & Ball’s wallpaper line and Lewis Miller Design’s Floral Flash Installs that encourage people to interact and take flowers home with them. The installation drew online traffic, with many posting on social platforms, and ultimately was named the Prettiest Fashion Week install by vogue.com.
By Audrey Clark
If you ask most people what they think of when they hear the word advertising, they’ll think of its more traditional forms: television, radio, print and billboards. And when asked if they know what “disruptive advertising” is, you often see a puzzled look.
The term was made popular by Jay Conrad Levinson’s 1984 book, Guerrilla Marketing. The term itself sounds intense, but it isn’t. Guerrilla marketing is an advertisement strategy in which a company itself, or through an agency, uses surprise and unconventional interactions with the public in order to promote a product or service. In a way, guerrilla marketing set the foundation for the future of disruptive advertising and for the advent of our company, posterGIANT.
posterGIANT was founded in 1999 in Seattle. And 21 years later, our foundation is still just as strong in guerrilla marketing, but we’ve expanded into many different mediums, including experiential marketing and disruptive marketing, working in cities across America and around the world. We do anything we can to get the results our clients need; the more “outside the box” and disruptive the better.
Our goal is to have a client’s campaign reach the most people possible. For example, if a campaign is disruptive enough, it will go viral and the everyday public will become a part of your marketing team by posting photos and hashtags on social platforms. In 2020, 79% of all people have social media at their fingertips—up 2% from 2019.
So this why we’ve seen a growth in disruptive advertising. The actual definition of this form of advertising can be interpreted differently by different people, but—in a nutshell—it means an ad that breaks through the noise of all other campaigns, grabs its target’s attention and collects those coveted social-media hits.
In one disruptive-advertising campaign, we took over a city block during the 2017 NYFW, with a poster-wallpaper and flash-floral installation set up by our clients—as pictured and described above. We also helped the City of Calgary’s bid for the second Amazon Headquarters with a giant banner, installed on a building across from Amazon’s Seattle campus, coupled with chalk sidewalk stencils. Later, the City of Calgary came back and we installed turf on a wall in Lake Union, with a QR Code call to action, drawing lots of interaction from passersby. (See photos and cutlines below.)
Overall, we ’re living in changing and exciting times when it comes to advertising. More and more we see brands, both large and small, getting involved in outside-the-box ways to advertise. And frankly, we can’t wait to see what else posterGIANT clients want to do to push the disruptive-advertising envelope.
With most of the world watching to see what city Amazon would pick as its second headquarters, posterGIANT brought the City of Calgary’s bid to life. This is the overnight guerrilla execution of a 100’x10’ banner, with the campaigns hero slogan, coupled with chalk stencils around the Amazon campus across the street.
Although it lost the Amazon bid, the City of Calgary wanted to let the people of Seattle know it had legalized marijuana and to let both the tech and cannabis industries know it had plenty of real estate and jobs waiting. With an overnight install of astro turf w/stencil art and a QR banner, posterGIANT made sure the hero slogan was noticed. With this campaign situated in the heart of Lake Union, both foot and vehicle traffic were sure to get the message loud and clear.
Audrey Clark is the national campaign and operations manager for posterGIANT. You can contact her at www.postergiant.net.