From Blank Canvas to Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

What You’ll Do

Project: Create a Guerrilla Marketing Campaign for a Fictional Product.

What You’ll Learn

This class is about being original, approaching things from different angles, and trying our utmost best to avoid following the herd. As someone who's spent much of my 12+ years in advertising focused on guerrilla marketing, PR stunts, and various other shenanigans, all at a mere fraction of the budget normally reserved for traditional advertising, I've had to rely on those qualities to satisfy my and my clients' objectives. In keeping with that tradition, in this class, rather than present you with a brief for an existing product,, we're going to turn that model on its head and have a bit of creative fun.

Instead of giving you a product to come up with a campaign for, we'll go through an exercise to help you come up with an imaginary product yourself (don't worry, the idea can be as simple as you'd like). The real focus is coming up with an idea for a guerrilla marketing campaign to sell that fictional product. On a budget of next to nothing, how would you market this product, and to whom? This is one of the fundamental questions that this class will help you answer.

Along the way, there will be creative pointers, case studies, a bit of history around guerrilla and non-traditional marketing, and a whole host of other resources to help you complete your project. You’ll leave this class having learned how to open up your creativity and think freely, having created a guerrilla campaign of your own, and possessing the skills necessary to apply these concepts to a wide array of different scenarios and projects.

Let's open up our minds to think freely and go guerrilla.

Beginner Level

About Your Teacher See Full Bio

Floyd Hayes · Former CD, Cunning New York, currently running FHC

I'm the former Creative Director at Cunning London, Europe's first specialized Guerrilla Marketing agency. Here, I worked on dozens of high profile guerrilla stunts as well as the launch of the MINI Cooper, credited as the most successful small car launch of all time. From there I moved to the states to help set up Cunning NYC, working on clients such Syfy, Unilever, HSBC and Toyota before becoming an independent Creative gun for hire.

I’m a Creative Director who develops marketing platforms and tactics that demand attention, earn engagement and spur audience action.My thinking encompasses digital, ARG, social, event concepts, ambient, guerrilla marketing, PR Stunts and related shenanigans.

I believe that in a world where media can be anything, the idea has to be everything. In short, I develop ideas to sell your stuff.

I’m also the founder of @twipple twitter’s random acts of kindness feed which the Huffington Post called: “The most thoughtful use of twitter we’ve seen.”

Past and present clients: Mini Cooper, Levi’s, Unilever, HSBC, NBC, Cadbury Adams, BMW Dubai, Vodafone Australia, JWT, BBH, ESPN, Virgin, Zenith Media.

I’ve lectured at the London College of Printing and New York University as well as to a wide variety of global media companies, including the BBC, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Wired, National Public Radio and numerous industry blogs.

I enjoy developing creative thinking techniques and use my experience in NLP to destroy creative blocks within myself and others.