Follis Guerilla Marketing



Guerilla Marketing... Non-traditional Advertising... Buzz Marketing... it goes by many names. Its purpose is the same: a more low cost, more grassroots, more unexpected, and often more creative way of reaching a more targeted audience. Here are highly successful examples of what we've done for our clients.


Marble Church (in NYC) wanted to get on the radar of hip, young, affluent New Yorkers. The minister wanted the marketing effort to start late summer. Though the church was Manhattan based we knew the target audience spent weekends in the Hamptons. Our solution was an airplane banner flying over those beaches during that last, long, Labor Day weekend of summer.



The untraditional effort not only attracted the attention of our target audience, it also attracted great press in The New York Times and ADWEEK.



This Mobile Billboard cruising around Manhattan was another low cost, high concept element of our effective Guerilla Marketing effort. Like the airplane banner it was the perfect marriage of media and message.



Besides The New York Times and ADWEEK, the campaign has gotten press in TIME magazine, USAToday, The New York Daily News, international press, and is a featured case in a college marketing text
Principles of Marketing (Prentice-Hall). View the Follis "God Squad" TV interview about the campaign.

Besides the great press, Marble Church reported a 31% membership increase 2 years after the campaign began. What was slated by the church, in '98, to be a one shot deal is now a highly successful, on-going 11-year campaign.
Marble Minister Arthur Caliandro called the ads "brilliant" adding that "they are doing great things for the church."

A current Guerilla Marketing tactic utilizes postcards listing the many church programs. But rather than incur the time and cost of mailing thousands of postcards, we opted to do something cheaper and smarter: use the church membership as a sales force. Have the 6,000 passionate church goers become "Johnny Appleseeds" for Marble. We know the members love the campaign, so we knew they'd be happy to be part of the effort. 15,000 cards were be printed for disbursement -- in pew racks and at church events during the next several months.


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Street Marketing is another form of Guerilla Marketing.
Our client "The South Street Seaport Line" was a much shorter, and better,
NYC boat tour that competed with the more
famous, and longer, Circle Line tour.










Our Street Marketing Swat Team passed out promotional barf bags to tourists who were about to buy Circle Line tickets. Free shuttle buses would then whisk them down the road to "The Better Boat Tour" of New York.

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Online Viral Marketing is another type of Guerilla Marketing. ("Viral" means spreading and multiplying exponentially -- like a virus.)

In the fall of '04 Follis Inc combined its passion for public service with expertise for marketing and created an email ad (that could be easily forwarded) that encouraged voting. Over a two month period the viral ad quadrupled site traffic on follisinc.com. Presumably, it also got a few folks to vote.



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