One branch of the alternative marketing movement that has been getting more and more attention, and becoming more and more popular, is making marketing personal. Advertisers seek to create personal connections with the people that they are seeking to entice to purchase their product. This can be done in many ways, but the most solidly constructive is the creation of “street teams.”

Street teams are paid conversationalists. They go out into a market, generally large cities, and hit the streets. They chat up people they pass, touting a particular product or brand. They paper a city with fliers and posters for that product. Often, they hand out free sample or even full-size versions of the product being touted.

This model is the first step in creating buzz. You have to get people talking about your product to create the word of mouth network that will make your product take off. Advertisers have discovered that one way to start the network of personal connections that is buzz is to force personal connections between your consumers and your company.

The Freebie Factor

Tapping into the power of the freebie works. Just ask Ford Motor Company about the success of its product seeding campaign for the Ford Focus. Ford gave advance models to employees of celebrities like Madonna and Adam Sandler, so the cars would become de facto commercials parked in front of the hippest clubs, restaurants and parties in town. From a base of a mere 120 influential Gen Y hipsters in five key markets, Ford moved a fleet-worthy 286,166 units in its first year.

The Ford Focus promotion was not exactly the same kind of personal contact that the street team embodies, but it does follow some of the same precepts as the personal contact model: people trust people outside of the advertising world much more than they trust people in the marketing world. By giving the cars to “normal” people, Ford created some kind of personal connection between the recipients of their freebies and the consumers they were trying to reach, Ford created buzz. The people that were given the cars were not paid marketers, and they were not celebrities. They were just people, with perhaps slightly more glamorous lives than the average consumer. Even this tenuous personal connection is enough to jump start people talking, and trusting what is said.

This "appe-teaser" strategy also paid off big for Hotmail when launching its free e-mail service. Each subscriber e-mail went out with a recruitment message to the recipient and the implied endorsement of the sender. This was a much more direct personal-connection campaign. The assumption is that people would be sending email to people they knew; the implied endorsement was then seen as a personal endorsement from one person to another, where the two people did have a personal connection. The net result was what some view as the fastest new product adoption rate in history-from zero to 12 million members in just 18 months.

Tag Team Teasers

Another common marketing teaser is the bar pick-up. If a beautiful woman approaches you in a bar, slips a note in your pocket and whispers "Save me" in your ear, there's nothing salacious about it. The implication is, of course, that the woman is interested in you, personally. Call the number to find out her fate, and instead, you'll ring through to a pitch for some sort of product. You may feel let down that the beautiful woman wasn't interested in you, after all, but you do know the product, now, and you may even be appreciative enough of the “cleverness” of the marketing scheme to overlook that disappointment. In case you're curious, chivalry still reigns, and about 60 percent of solicited men called the number.

Another example of using the beautiful people to sell a product can be found in one Vespa's marketing campaigns. Vespa, maker of hip “scooters” that are somewhere between a motorcycle and a bicycle, hired a posse of great-looking posers and dispatched them to hang out on the company’s scooters near Los Angeles hot spots like Sunset Plaza, Melrose and the Third Street Promenade. A query about the motorbikes earned the inside scoop that trend-setters like Sandra Bullock and rapper Sisqo are Vespa owners, as well as the address and phone number of the nearest Vespa boutique. Buzz was created through a combination of product placement, glamorization, and personal connection to an advertiser.

Score one for the new generation of buzz marketers. While those schooled in so-called "classical" guerrilla marketing techniques may hold that viral marketing drives consumers to the product, many new age practitioners like Big Fat, a Manhattan-based viral marketing agency, are going a step further. They recruit street marketers to take the product to the people for clients like Nestle, Nintendo and Pepsi.

Other tag teams earning notice for their ambush marketing tactics include:

* Lucky Strike Force crews-armed with iced coffee and beach chairs in summer, hot coffee and cell phones in winter-attempted to make exiled smokers more comfortable outside office buildings.
* Hebrew National "mom squads" hit the road in SUVs, firing up the barbecue grill for impromptu backyard parties replete with product samples and coupons.
* Sony Ericsson couples equipped with the new T68i cell phone/video camera wandered the streets of New York and Los Angeles pretending to be tourists. Passers-by kind enough to agree to take their picture got an unsolicited product pitch in return.

Ethical Issues

These kinds of campaigns have their own unique set of advertising ethics. The biggest issue in marketing campaigns designed to create word of mouth buzz is disclosure of connections. Because word of mouth is supposed to be a personal connection, people will trust what is said more. As has been noted, trust of people saying good things about a product increases if the persona saying the good things is outside of the advertising world.

So, if you think you're getting an objective opinion from John Doe about Product Q, you may be more inclined to trust it than if you saw a television ad containing the same information. This is because you assume John Doe is a regular person, like you. However, if John Doe is actually being paid by the company that produces Product Q, your opinion of the accuracy of any information he gives you may change, sometimes markedly.

Disclosure of who is working for whom, and who is actually just excited about a particular product becomes a sticky area in advertising ethics. If the company discloses that they are paying people to talk up their product, they risk losing the buzz that they create. If they do not disclose, they risk a backlash against their opaque marketing practices that take advantage of the general population’s trust of the general population.