Measurement: Impact, trends and developments

Is any press good press? A recent publicity stunt held here in Singapore questioned this maxim after garnering media attention and sparking fiery conversations about where to draw the line between guerilla marketing and creating a public nuisance.

In an effort to promote its shavers, Philips Electronics held a guerilla marketing stunt involving a man in a bear suit rummaging through trash cans in Ulu Pandan at 2 in the morning.  How this has to do with buying shavers, I’m still not quite sure – and the bear in the video was a black bear of the type commonly found in North America, not a type to be found even in the Singapore Zoo.

But the public and the government took it very seriously, slapping a public nuisance investigation on the agency responsible, The Secret Little Agency. While some are questioning whether we all just need a better sense of humor, I thought I’d take a deeper look into the stunt and its relation to the Philips brand.

The execution of the stunt had its ups and downs. The agency behind the campaign did some of their homework, calling the police beforehand to see whether a permit was needed for mascots. After filming it, the video was released online and picked up discussion on the online platform STOMP.  But they failed to gain authenticity among traditional press by having a questionable spokesperson behind the event, which stunted the spread of the campaign as legitimate news.

Their main source for the story was a Mr. Wilson Tay, who claimed to have been responsible for capturing the video – but after he called newsrooms, he could not be contacted on the same phone number. The New Paper ran the story  with some expressed trepidation, but TODAY didn’t run it until Philips claimed responsibility for the stunt, saying they embargoed the story because details could not be authenticated.

The story did get pick-up in the online space, ultimately getting 334 mentions in blogs, based on an archive search for “Ulu Pandan” and “Bear”. While the page got a 49% LOL rating from its viewers on STOMP, comments seem to be a little more incendiary:

“The marketing department should be fired for this and to whoever approved this idea - you need an MRI to see if your brain is in your skull. I was so worried when driving past the area and afraid a bear would stomp my car out of the blue, hungry for food and had me for supper. I will NEVER buy Philips - I can do without. What if there is a real bear out there and calling the police and they will think it's a PR stunt. Crying wolf by all these advertisers will cause real situations to be ignored.” - hairyfairy

This may have been the actual intended audience of the guerilla marketing stunt, judging by its YouTube release – but the nature of the act served more to alienate its audience rather than engage them. And while the stunt clearly sparked discussion as intended, it didn’t tie back to the brand in the way they’d intended – maybe fortunately for Philips, given the negative response they got in the end. If they’d done a bit more homework by looking at past press coverage similar animal sightings received in the past, they’d find that these kinds of stories always have overwhelmingly negative connotations.

I ran a search on the articles over the past 3 months in Media Monitors’ Singapore archive that mentioned the keyword “bear”, and (after filtering out mentions of the bear market) found that they were highly negative in tone. The biggest stories to receive pick-up in Singapore included an animal welfare case involving polar bears at the Singapore Zoo, and a bear in the US that wrecked a car.

I ran a similar search on the campaign itself to see what the nature of the discussion was around the stunt, and found an even split between the terms “Ulu Pandan Bear,” “Philips” and “The Secret Little Agency” in newspapers. It is interesting that it served to leverage the advertising agency just as much as the brand itself, though in both cases spokespeople were acting on the defence.

However, only 3 out of 45 Tweets archived since October 17th tie the campaign back to Philips:

@koolwool: @missu_ada Like how the Philips logo didn’t appear on the Ulu Pandan bear video. I said viral campaign.

@izreloaded: It’s the Philips Carnival Sale 2010. I’m very sure the Ulu Pandan bear won’t be there.

The key takeaways I got from this are as follows:

1. Guerilla marketing is cheap and effective, but it requires homework and a tie-in to the brand that engages audiences. Tim Clark, a communications professor at Nanyang Technological University was quoted on this issue in the Straits Times, saying “Was it relevant to Philips’ shavers? If the only relevance was the suggestion that avoiding being mauled by a bear was a close shave, then that seems to me to be a rather lame pun.”


2. There is a line to be drawn between getting any publicity, and getting the kind of publicity that the brand wants. In this case, Philips was lucky in averting even more of a PR disaster because of point 1, but it certainly didn’t make anyone want to go out and buy shavers or raise the cool factor of the brand.

3. The public also needs to lighten up a little bit. Yes, they crossed the line and wasted public resources. But in the end nobody was hurt. Sometimes guerilla and viral marketing can be fun and engaging – and yes, even in practical Singapore. One good example is the Raffles Place ghost campaign for GMP, which scared us into not working late - but didn’t drive us away from the brand (even Anderson Cooper liked it).
 

In the end the impact for Philips will only be determined by the “stickiness” of the campaign as a future cultural reference – but already some are spoofing it with a bear of their own.
 

Image kindly provided by Greenpeace