12 June 2025 Thursday
The Rise of Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla marketing encompasses creative, unconventional, and often street-based promotional strategies designed to achieve high impact with low budgets. These strategies typically rely on surprise, humor, shock value, and powerful visuals.
The core characteristics of guerrilla marketing include appearing in unexpected places, blending with digital platforms to create viral impact, being participatory or interactive, drawing maximum attention in a short time, and often emerging in a hybrid form—spanning physical public spaces and digital media. Guerrilla marketing is no longer limited to physical spaces. Especially on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, digital guerrilla campaigns are now developed using AR (Augmented Reality) filters, viral sound effects, and challenge-based content formats.
Today, guerrilla marketing has become one of the most prominent rising trends in advertising campaigns. One of the most notable recent examples is Maybelline’s “Giant Mascara Ad” in London in 2023. In this campaign, Maybelline attached oversized mascara brushes to the wheels of a bus and released a video that quickly went viral on TikTok and Instagram. As the bus wheels turned, the brushes appeared to apply mascara to imaginary lashes.
Aside from Maybelline, McDonald’s guerrilla ad in France in 2022 also drew significant public attention. In this campaign, crosswalk stripes were redesigned to resemble McDonald’s French fries, with a giant ketchup packet placed at the edge of the walkway.
Guerrilla marketing was also used in the 2023 promotional campaign for the Barbie movie. In this campaign, the brand covered billboards and bus stops in major cities entirely in Barbie pink, with no text whatsoever. The Malibu Barbie Dreamhouse was made available to rent via Airbnb, and in Australia, a large Barbie footprint was placed on a beach.
Gillette, in the U.S. in 2023, implemented a guerrilla campaign by placing invisible motivational messages on mirrors in men’s restrooms at universities and gyms—messages that would only become visible when steam or humidity hit the surface. This transformed a personal space (the mirror), created emotional resonance, strengthened brand image, and added an element of surprise through the “invisible message” effect.
In France in 2024, the NGO Doctors of the World used guerrilla advertising to draw attention to migrants’ access to healthcare. The campaign featured billboards that were invisible under sunlight but became visible at night under streetlights, displaying the message: “Become visible for invisible lives.”
Netflix also leveraged guerrilla marketing techniques in 2022 to promote Stranger Things Season 4. In various cities around the world, animations of portals to the “Upside Down” were projected into the sky. In London, a 3D projection made it appear as if a Demogorgon was bursting through a building wall. In the Paris metro, a tunnel was transformed into an immersive, interactive Stranger Things experience.