Dept. of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Vienna

Performing Advertising: The Paradox

Alicja Khatchikian / Goda Palekaite

Dept. of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Vienna

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Table of contents

Introduction……………………………………………………………........2

Performance Art: Art without ethics is cosmetics……………………….3

The Power to Provoke

Pioneers and the Imperative for Change

Participation: The Role of Audience

Performativity: Performance in Ritual and Everyday Life……………...9

Turner and the Ritual Performance

The Omnipresent Performativity

Goffman and the Performance of Social Life

Guerrilla Marketing and Advertising…………………………………......14

An Example: The Blair Witch Project

Goffman and McLuhan: Everydayness and Action

Kalantzis and Cope’s: Multiliteracy and Design Elements

Analysing Guerrilla #1: Have a Break with KitKat

Analysing Guerrilla #2: Street Ad

Performing Advertising: The Paradox…………...……………………...23

Conclusions……………………………………………………………......24

References…………………………………………………………….......26

Internet Resources……………………………………………………......27

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Introduction

The era of global capitalism brings into existence diverse paradoxes: forms of art that have

originally been a critical and ideology-unmasking force are being employed to serve

business industries, “culture” is becoming commodified in any occasion; and the ideas,

once alternative and ice-breaking, are turned into pop-culture. One might observe such

contradictory developments in e.g. commodification of subcultures (e.g. punk-style

fashion) and diverse other phenomena; nevertheless, within this paper, we demonstrate

the paradox that arises in the comparison between the performance art and commercial

guerrilla marketing and advertising.

Hereby, we start with the consideration of performance art as such and its most typical

radical manifestations such as Marina’s Abramovic works and statement “Art without

ethics is cosmetics”. Performance art is presented as a form of expression that crosses the

boundaries between disciplines, and is essentially anti-institutional and provoking. For this

purpose, we briefly introduce its development as well as its historical and social context.

Further, we discuss the most crucial compound in any performance as well as marketing

strategy, namely the presence of audience. Moreover, the discourse of performativity in

the sense of postmodernist/poststructural thought is taken into consideration, as well as

the relation between performance art and ritual performance, and the multivocality of

symbols within it – in this regard, we introduce the main notions by Victor Turner.

Following and in combination with the semiotic approach, relate the concept of

multivocality with multiliteracy while analyzing the examples of guerrilla ads within the

framework of visual analysis suggested by Kalantzis and Cope. However, the central

figure for the theoretical framework is Erving Goffman and his notions of the performance

of social everyday life, misrepresentation, and commercial realism, among others; as well

as Marshall McLuhan’s consideration of the role of media and technologies within the

process of shaping a personality. Throughout the text, we illustrate the mentioned ideas

with examples from the field of performance art; moreover, we employ analysis of certain

cases of commercial guerrilla marketing and advertising.

As this paper argues, commercial guerrilla marketing is performative in the sense of artistic

strategies, tools and means for communicating a message. It is characterized by non-

conventional and provoking style of expression through action that was first developed by

performance artists. Yet, it seeks to astonish and surprise the onlooker in order to gain

his/her interest in consuming more, in a contrary to performance art that does not intend to

delight the society, instead – to criticize it.

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Performance Art: Art without ethics is cosmetics

Art did not initially have a self-referential content or context; instead, it started out by

referring to humans, to their need to religion and ritual, and their perception of the

environment. Belgrade-born performer Marina Abramovic, actively working in the art scene

since the 1970s, frequently challenges the limits of her own body and mind, and radically

opposes art that refers only to itself, postulating that Art without ethics is cosmetics (cf.

Drathen 1992).

In 1997 Venice Biennale Abramovic performed the prominent Balkan Baroque: she scrubbed the flesh

off beef bones five days long, meditatively singing songs that she remembered from her childhood in

the civil war of Yugoslavia (cf. Hoffmann/Jonas 2005: 142).

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The Power to Provoke

Performance art is an indispensable constituent not only for contemporary art history but

also for the whole contemporary cultural knowledge, whether in philosophy, anthropology,

political activism, architecture and design, or media. An alternative title for the same

phenomenon – Live art underlines that it is the conceptual and the practical, the individual

and the collective, the universal and the specific, the personal and the political, connected

through body and action in a particular time and space.

The meaning of a performance is always constituted in the present and, therefore, never

final. In fact, it is in the action that we re-experience, re-live, re-create, re-tell, re-construct,

and re-fashion our culture. The performance does not release a preexisting meaning;

instead, it is always in the present, in the here-and-now (cf. Bruner 1986: 11). When the

act is over, the meaning vanishes – it can never be captured. It leaves traces though: the

borders between disciplines are being crossed since the performance art combines visual

and media arts, theater and dance; the conformist and entertainment-seeking crowds are

being violated since the performance art interrupts in their everyday life. The private and

the public spheres merge. Performance art, thus, allows our cultural moment “to step from

its edges” (Goldberg 2004: 11).

Provocation is a constant characteristic for the performance art, whether political, art

critical, or socially engaged – it is intended to cause a change. In fact, “[p]erformance art

never settles exclusively on any one theme, issue, or mode of expression; rather, it defines

itself in each case by responding provocatively. It rarely aims to seduce its audience and is

more likely to unravel and examine critically the techniques of seduction, unnerving

viewers in the process, rather than providing them with an ambiguous setting for desire”

(Goldberg 2004: 13).

For instance, Guerilla Girls is a group of anonymous feminist artists and activists staunchly

fighting against sexism and racism within the art world. Working since the 1985 when the

group was initially founded by seven women, Guerrilla Girls still actively organize public

protests, create posters, stickers, billboards and artwork, and engage in research on the

unfair conditions of working women artists and artists of color.

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Guerrilla Girls (1989)

Intentionally anti-institutional and critical towards the hegemony of art market, performance

art does not follow any written script; instead, it challenges the established everyday life,

artistic and political scenarios. On the other hand, as it is discussed further, performance

art has to be considered in response to greater philosophic conception of performativity

(postmodernism and poststructuralism), and, specifically, in close relation to ritual (Turner)

and the performance of social life (Goffman). The latter, however, may be fully scripted,

totally institutional, and appears without the critical eye of the author that is so typical for

performance artists.

As we shall discuss within the chapters on commercial guerrilla marketing, also business

and marketing strategies learnt from performance art and performance in general how to

be creative and achieve the performative quality of work – how to challenge and reject

norms and rules in a modus of action. Hence, the issue is highly complex and

controversial: language confuses us by offering one word for opposite phenomena. As we

will further emphasize, the key difference may be understood by looking at authors’

(whether artists’ or business managers’) intentions. Therefore, willing to trace the main

grounding motivations of performance art, we shall start showing the development of the

field.

Pioneers and the Imperative for Change

One can trace the roots of performance art in the very beginning of the 20th century,

particularly, in the ideas and artistic practices of the avant-garde movements such as

Futurism, Russian Constructivism, Dada, and Surrealism. By questioning the means and

purposes of artistic expression in general, as well as criticizing the separation between art

and social life, the unconventional, experimental acts, and radical art-political manifests

paved the way for the performance art.

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Hence, the performance art was born among those painters and sculptors who found their

interest in change: from product to process, from stable to active, from “work-in-itself”

(finished, complete, and unchanging) to the “work-in-progress” (incomplete, contingent,

and fluid), turning painters and sculptors into performers (cf. Carlson 2004: 138).

However, for half of the century, the new genre was overlooked because it fit no category,

and unexamined because the material could no longer be perceived but only described.

The field started to be recognized as independent during the 1960s in the USA, Western

Europe and Japan. As Roselee Goldberg, the key figure in the theory of performance art

shows: “It was in the late 1960s that increasing number of artists turned to live

performance as the most radical form of art-making, irrevocably disrupting the course of

traditional art history. […] Performance has attracted very different practitioners: Yves

Klein, Piero Manzoni, Joseph Beuys and Hermann Nitsch in Europe; Yoshihara Jiro, Yoko

Ono, Atsuko Tanaka, Shigeko Kubota, and Yayoi Kusama in Japan; Carolee

Schneemann, Robert Whitman, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, Yvone Rainer, and Allan

Kaprow in the United States. […] Their actions, more often than not, were provocative and

ironic, and they were frequently responsive to the political and socially transforming

developments that raged around them” (Goldberg 2004: 15).

One more essential change happened in the 1980s, when many new faces entered the

field of the performance art: non-western, non-white, and non-educated artists with their

social and cultural experiences became visible, bringing their diverse perspectives and

concerns. In fact, since the late 1980s, the diaspora cultures of Afro-American, Latino and

other communities, and the artistic manifestation arising in all continents, became subjects

of study. It is no longer a distant reference for anthropologists; instead, this material is

being folded into even the most traditional histories of art and performance itself (cf.

Goldberg 2004). Since the 1990s, it is to be noticed that the psychological aspect gives

the place for the social one. Performers started to represent themselves as members of a

specific ethnic, gender, or sexual background in order to express the tensions and

dynamics of the surrounding culture (cf. Carlson 2004: 177).

Although performance art borrowed formal elements from theater, it is fundamentally an

anti-thesis to theater, seeking for an authentic experience of the performer and the

audience in an event that in an ideal way could not be repeated or captured. It refuses the

theatrical structure based on a prescribed play and the theatrical illusion so widely spread

since the traditional realistic (Stanislavskian) theater. On the contrary, the performance art

typically has four anti-theatrical components: (1) It happens in a particular space, which is

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not illusively created by a narrative story and stage design elements (here); (2) it happens

in a particular period of time (now); (3) the audience is present and perceived by the

performer, that is, an interaction occurs (between); (4) it spotlights the performer’s person

and body – the performer is not an actor/actress, playing a role, but represents his or her

own person with his or her own concerns.

However, even though there are certain characteristics that have been mentioned above,

there exists no complete and final definition for the performance art, since confining it in a

definition would be a self-contradiction. Hence, performance art might be any situation that

involves these four basic elements: present time, actual space, the performer's body, and

the relationship between the performer and the audience.

Participation: The Role of Audience

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world.

(Marcel Duchamp 1957)

In a performance, participants do not necessarily share a common experience nor do they

necessarily perceive the meaning commonly; what they share is only their common

participation (cf. Bruner 1986: 11). Involving the audience does not restrain performance

with one-way message; on the contrary, the meaning is interpreted, constructed and

created from both sides. To be more precise, the meaning is constructed from many

difference sides, since every individual in the audience has his/her own interpretation:

“Individuals experience themselves – they experience their experience and reflect on it.

[…] Further, I do not experience your experience. Paradoxically, your experience is made

mine; I experience my experience of you” (Kapferer 1986: 189).

One of the most prominent figures in the performance art, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, works

since the late 1970s constantly creating hybrids made from carpa (Mexican popular

theater), magical realism, kabuki, and US multimedia. Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his

colleagues combine parody, irony, ritual, popular arts, and social commentary. Being a

performance artist, critical theorist, poet, and provocateur, he states: “I make art about the

misunderstandings that take place at the border zone. But for me, the border is no longer

located at any fixed geopolitical site. I carry the border with me, and I find borders

wherever I go” (Schechner 2002: 257-8).

However, the crucial border that has been profoundly investigated by artists like Gómez-

Peña, Coco Fusco and others is the wall between the artist and the audience, the artwork

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and the social reality. During their performance Two undiscovered Amerindians Visit…

(1992-1994), Gómez-Peña and Fusco placed themselves in a travelling golden cage

where they lived for three days in each city they visited, pretending to be a “newly

discovered Amerindians” from an island that had been overlooked by Europeans for

centuries. Not only the piece criticized the colonial curiosity and the objectification of the

other, but it also aimed to be a kind of “artistic research” on the audience’s reaction. The

spectator was left alone to interpret the situation according to his/her background, as well

as to react – to complete the performance in his/her way.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco during Two undiscovered Amerindians Visit… (1992).

In his article in the famous collection “Anthropology of experience” (1986), Bruce Kapferer

talks about the directionality of performance – the performance is always directed to the

audience; it always intends to create the possibility for the mutual involvement of

participants in one experience, or else distance them and lead to their reflection on

experience outside the immediacy of the experience. Furthermore, the possibility of mutual

experience (sense of experiencing together the one experience) is present “in many of the

cultural performances [people] recognize as art and ritual. Art and ritual share potentially

one fundamental quality in common: the Particular and the Universal [notions borrowed

from Emile Durkheim] are brought together and are transformed in the process” (cf.

Kapferer 1986: 191-193).

Hence, the (potentially) shared experience among the partakers is the fundamental

intention shared by the performance art and ritual. To this point, we will further elaborate

on the crucial anthropological insights on the ritual performance, namely on the concepts

by Victor W. Turner.

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Performativity: Performance in Ritual and Everyday Life

I would say that everything imaginable has been, or can be, experienced as actual by means of

performance. And that, as Turner said, it is by imagining – by playing and performing – that new

actualities are brought into existence. Which is to say, there is no fiction, only unrealized actuality.

(Schechner 1986: 363)

Turner and the Ritual Performance

The process that is actualized and perceived in art and ritual as performance makes us

recognize that much of ritual is art, and much of art is actually ritual (cf. Kapferer 1986:

191). To this regard, Victor Turner was the one who made us realize that rites and rituals

are creative – they do not simply reproduce a given social and symbolical order but allow

constructing something new. In fact, they are symbolically, spatially and temporally

dynamic (cf. Evans 1996: 1121).

As already elaborated above, every performance is self-constituting instead of being a

mere reflection upon society. Moreover, every symbol that appears in a performance is,

according to Turner, multivocal – what means their ambiguous and distinctive character –

one object/action may stand for different ideas for different people.

Throughout his works, Victor Turner extended and further developed the idea of Arnold

van Gennep that suggests that a ritual, as in the case of a rite of passage, consists of

three phases: separation, liminality, and reaggregation. As John Mitchel explains:

“Separation involves the physical detachment of the participant from normal life, and entry

into a liminal, transcendent phase. Liminality, which Turner sees as by far the most

important phase, involves a prolonged period in which the participant is both literally and

symbolically marginalized. Reaggregation is when the participant returns to society”

(Mitchel 1996: 491).

Liminality is for Turner the most important phase of rites of passage and is seen as a state

of being in between. In the liminal phase, the individual is separated from society and

mentally and physically challenged. This phase is “characterized by the presence of

ambiguous ideas, monstrous images, sacred symbols, ordeals, humiliations, esoteric and

paradoxical instructions, the emergence of symbolic types represented by maskers and

clowns, gender reversals, anonymity, and many other phenomena and processes which

[he has] described as “liminal.” […] [It] is a no-man’s-land betwixt and between the

structural past and the structural future” (Turner 1986: 41).

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Amusingly enough, performance artists often deal in the ritual-like ways to communicate

their ideas. A typical example is Marina Abramovic, who often finds herself in a liminal

state in her performances by using the means of meditation, physical violation, and mental

challenges. Probably the most representative example who influenced Abramovic – one of

the pioneers of performance art, who claimed to be an artist and a shaman, was the

German artist Joseph Beuys.

He was a crucial figure in establishing performance art as both – a social and a ritualized

artistic practice. As Goldberg writes, “[c]ommited to the idea that art has a capacity to

transform people – socially, spiritually, and intellectually–Beuys created what he called

“social sculptures”. These might include lectures, collaborative protest activities […], or

symposia on art and politics. […] [In 1974, the artist performed his famous I Like America

and America Likes Me, where a coyote stood for a] metaphor for the tragic decimation of

the Native American peoples (who respected the coyote) by the early European settlers

(who despised and shot it). Beuys spent a week “in captivity” with the wild animal in a New

York Gallery” (Goldberg 2004: 50).

Joseph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me, New York (1974)

The “lived through” experience that often implies mental and physical challenges for the

participants is commonly intended for those who partake in a ritual and in an artistic

performance. The creation of a detached, almost sacred space allows the search for the

spiritual power sources (cf. Turner 1986: 43).

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The Omnipresent Performativity

Performativity, however, cannot be exclusively analyzed in practices that are classically

understood as performative. The practice in visual arts, architecture, and performance art

called postmodernism and its academic response, namely the philosophy of

poststructuralism (and the related deconstruction) – all apply the “performance principle” to

every aspects of social and artistic life. Performance is no longer confined to the stage, the

arts, and the ritual. On the contrary, performativity is everywhere linked to the

interdependence of text and interpretation, action and reaction, subject and object (cf.

Schechner 2002: 114).

Richard Schechner, an influential director and performer and, importantly, one of the few

who has bridged the gap between theory and artistic practice and founded the New York

University’s distinguished Performance Studies department, explains: “Recognizing,

analyzing, and theorizing the convergence and collapse of clearly demarcated realities,

hierarchies, and categories is at the heart of postmodernism. Such a convergence or

collapse is a profound departure from traditional Western performance theory. From Plato

and Aristotle forward, theorists have agreed that [art] “imitates”, “reflects”, “represents”, or

“expresses” individual actions and social life. […] Representational art […] is based on the

assumption that “art” and “life” are not only separate but of different orders of reality: life is

primary, art secondary. But developments in photography, film, and digital media

overturned traditional theories. Questions arose concerning exactly what was an “original”

– even if there could be such a thing as an original” (Schechner 2002: 116).

Hence, every act and every idea is performative. The notions developed by French

poststructuralists (Derrida, Delleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard, among others) remain to have

a great impact on the contemporary philosophical, anthropological (e.g. the so called

performative turn) and art-critical thought.

Goffman and the Performance of Social Life

Moreover, Schechner suggests that if we behave appropriately, we feel appropriately (cf.

Schechner 2002); actions generate emotions (and vice versa), irrespectively of whether

those actions are “really happening”, “skillfully pretended” or “mechanically induced”. For

him, there is no much difference between ordinary behavior and professional acting, here

recalling the fundamental ideas of the Canadian-born sociologist Erving Goffman.

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In “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” (1959), Goffman employs the model of

theatrical performance to study the organization of social life. He assumes that individuals

inevitably have interests in attempting to control the impression others receive on their

actions in social situations. The whole book concerns with the techniques by which such

impressions are conveyed.

Goffman writes: “I have been using the term “performance“ to refer to all the activity of an

individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a

particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers”. He suggests

the model that explains the components of a social performance: first of all, there is the

“front” which is the “expressive equipment” of a performance and includes the “setting”,

involving furniture, décor, physical layout, and other background item which support the

action; and the “personal front” that can be most intimately identified with the performer

him/herself and may include clothing, sex, age, posture, speech patterns, facial

expressions, bodily gestures etc. (cf. Goffman 1997: 97-98). Hence, a person’s status or

character cannot be distinguished from the performance, neither in the sphere of art, nor

ritual or social activities. The self is a product of performance rather than a cause of it.

Further components of the performance include dramatic realization - the process whereby

individuals infuse their activity during a particular interaction with signs in order to convey

facts that may otherwise remain obscure; idealization - the tendency of actors to present

idealized impressions for their audience; expressive control - an attempt to keep

inconsistent moods and energies from disrupting the performance; misrepresentation; and

mystification - the maintenance of social distance which holds the audience in a state of

awe in regard to the performer.

In our study, misrepresentation is a crucial notion: many performers have capacity and

intend to misrepresent the facts and the social reality. Although Goffman does not hold

manipulation (the necessary tool for the misrepresentation) and morality in opposition at

all, we use this concept in order to understand the paradox evolving between the

performance (art) and alternative though still commercial marketing strategies.

Here, we are again concerned with the role of audience. In fact, as Goffman argues, the

audience is responsible to evaluate and judge the reliability of the misrepresentable cues

in any performative manifestation (cf. Goffman 1997:103).

In order to create a transition between the theories on performativity and performance and

commercial guerrilla marketing, and to underlines that the areas often merge and

complexly interrelate, we offer an instance taken from the “social reality” – an example of a

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performance that can hardly be categorized. It certainly is a misrepresentative

performative action of (somebody’s) everyday life that also might be claimed to have

marketing (e.g. fame and gifts) as well as artistic intentions.

On May 14, Kaycee Nicole Swenson, an effervescent 19-year-old, died from complications

surrounding leukemia, which she had been battling for nearly two years. From her home in

Kansas, Kaycee, an unyieldingly optimistic high school basketball star, had chronicled her

remissions and relapses in her online diary, or Weblog, which she had dubbed Living

Colours.

For nearly a year, thousands of people went to the site to follow her travails. Many came to

feel as if they knew her, and a few talked with her regularly on the phone. Some sent her

gifts. Others with cancer spoke of her as an inspiration. On May 15, when Kaycee's online

followers went to her Weblog, they found a small image of a rose, accompanied by an

announcement of her death:

''Thank you for the love, the joy, the laughter and the tears. We shall love you always and

forever.''

Hundreds of people, none of whom had ever met Kaycee, were crushed by the news of her

death. […] A few days after the death announcement, Debbie Swenson, a 40-year-old

homemaker, confessed to having invented the life and death of Kaycee. Ms. Swenson, who

has two teenage children and lives in Peabody, Kan., a small town about 50 miles

northeast of Wichita, had posed as Kaycee's mother.

In an interview at her home on Tuesday, Ms. Swenson, who appeared embarrassed and

contrite, acknowledged that she had been the one to create the Kaycee character but said

she had not intended to hurt anyone. She said she was surprised to learn how many people

had been reading about Kaycee and to learn how emotionally invested people had become.

[…] But Ms. Swenson's fabrication was constructed so expertly and made so emotionally

compelling that even when faced with evidence that it was not true, many people who were

sophisticated Internet veterans set aside their skepticism and continued to believe it. Others

put their online expertise to work to ferret out the truth about the fictitious Kaycee. […]

(Hafner 2001)

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Guerrilla Marketing and Advertising

Originally coined and firstly defined by the business-book American author Jay Conrad

Levinson in his Guerrilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big

Profits from your Small Business (1984), the notion takes originally inspiration from

guerrilla warfare, a form of irregular warfare where a small group of combatants combine

military tactics with extraordinary mobility and the element of surprise, among others, to

contrast a broader and less-mobile traditional army.

Applied to the business field, the notion became an umbrella term for non-traditional

marketing approaches and has been largely used for promotional strategies. In fact,

guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that uses low-cost and unconventional

means, e.g. aerosol art, graffiti, sticker bombing, and flash mobs, to convey or promote a

product or an idea. This unusual promotional system mainly relies on time, creativity and

imagination; in fact, guerrilla campaigns are typical unexpected and startling, potentially

interactive, and targets its consumers in unexpected though strategically designed places

– they talk, in fact, about ambient marketing due to the importance of the surroundings

wherein the logo is posited. The overall aim is to create a unique, engaging and thought-

provoking concept in order to generate buzz, and consequently turn viral.

To this extent, guerrilla advertising was initially born as a marketing tool for small business

owners with reduced or non-existent finances and resources of other kind, with a vocation

for flexibility and a willingness to take a certain grade of risk.

However, its great potential, mainly given by a great mixture between visibility and low

price, attracted also larger businesses, and started being used more and more by larger

companies and multinationals. As a matter of fact, while numerous large organizations still

strive to maintain a competitive edge through a “traditional” understanding of marketing

and trends, many other businesses started adopting more innovative approaches such as

those of guerrilla marketing.

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Animal Equality. Rome, Italy (2012) Jeep. Copenhagen, Denmark (2007)

For the purpose of this paper, we decided to concentrate only on the commercial type of

guerrilla advertising although the concept has been widely applied in several fields. For

instance, social aimed and non-profit guerilla advertising has been widely used by non-

governmental organizations and UN agencies such as WWF or UNICEF, among many

others, aiming to sensitize the public opinion to particular socio-cultural issues.

Nevertheless, the economic aspect is here still present, since they basically use guerilla

advertising to find new testimonials, fundraise and promote their campaigns.

Generally, both commercial and non-commercial guerilla advertising shares the focus on

the viewer, that is, the search for a deep and strong impact on target audience and

onlookers, whether there is an active and direct interaction with the audience or rather a

more passive and indirect one.

An Example: The Blair Witch Project

Traditional means of promotion such as printed media, as well as radio, TV, and

billboards, among others, are generally very expensive. On the other hand, advancements

in Internet and new technologies have facilitated the spread of guerrilla marketing

campaigns. Particularly, the web provided small- and medium-scale companies with

several opportunities to compete on the market with larger organizations and consequently

gain popularity.

Based on the so called “word-of-mouth” guerrilla tool, the widely known American horror

movie The Blair Witch Project (1999) is commonly considered as one of the first and most

successful examples of guerrilla marketing and advertising.

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With only one video camera, almost no trained actors, improvised script, and a minimal

budget of around $50,000, two students of the University of Central Florida Film School

managed to realize a movie that grossed over $250

million worldwide. In light of these evidences, The

Blair Witch Project was one of the most successful

guerilla marketing campaigns ever arose. The

promotion of the movie totally relied on its future

costumers’ trust and feedback, and primarily used

the Internet as channel. In fact, already in 1993, the

two movie creators drafted a short outline, and

produced an eight-minute documentary about the

myth of the Blair Witch. Consequently, they spread

the message through the Internet, disseminating fake interviews and fictional newspaper

articles on the mysterious disappearance of three young moviemakers. To this extent, they

generated an incredible and spontaneous web campaign around the event, reaching the

target audience effectively that will have later bought tickets to watch the movie in the

cinema.

One of the strongest aspects in the whole campaign certainly was its capability to

maximize the contact with targeted audience at a minimum cost by using the potential of

viral marketing, that is, “any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing

message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s

exposure and influence” (Wilson 2000).

However, clearly based on impact rather than volume, the role of costumers and audience

in guerilla marketing and advertising is of central relevance.

Goffman and McLuhan: Everydayness and Action

In order to gain an understanding of the role that audience plays in the construction and in

the perception of the guerrilla advertisement, we recall Erving Goffman again.

Particularly, his notion of “commercial realism” has been broadly applied to media studies

in the analysis of advertising. He writes: “The central example […] of what might be called

"commercial realism," the standard transformation employed in contemporary ads, in

which the scene is conceivable in all detail as one-that could in theory have occurred as

pictured, providing us with a simulated slice of life; but although the advertiser does not

seem intent on passing the picture off as a caught one, the understanding seems to be

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that we will not press him too far to account for just what sort of reality the scene has.”

However, he underlines, “[t]he term "realistic," like the term "sincerity" when applied to a

stage actor, is self-contradictory, meaning something that is praiseworthy by virtue of

being something else, although not that something else” (Goffman 1977: 15).

In other words, Goffman is showing that “social reality is oddly, perhaps pathologically,

formed out of discourses, especially media, that bear little responsibility to the truth of

things” (Lemert 1997: xx).

Although Goffman himself never inspected the mediating effects of television as separate

from the other dramatic forms - theater, radio, the newspaper, and the novel, he certainly

understood the great influence of visual media on American and global society since its

very beginning in the mid 1950s.

Using the power of visual media, “more of America and the world that had been held in

illusion became perfectly, inexorably visible” (Lemert 1997: xxxi). Nevertheless, the

contradiction carried by the media consists in the fact that they “communicate the most

unreal, garbled truths about social life,” (Lemert 1997: xix-xx) while attempting to make

everything visible, everything readable.

In this sense, the power of advertisings consists in their ability to engage in a talk with their

costumers and imagine their worlds by composing “utterances or narratives that speak or

attend […] to what [their] conversational partner is meaning to say. Talk, thus, is like

reality. Both require attention less to what is, or is said, than to the imaginary worlds

(Lemer 1997: xli).

In the age of media technologies, the boundaries between public and private dimensions

of presentations of the self have become increasingly blurred. To this regard, the

Canadian philosopher of communication theory H. Marshall McLuhan, Goffman’s peer and

compatriot, argues that “[w]hereas in the previous technologies of fragmented extensions

of the body there had been typically a considerable gap in time between social action and

the ensuing consequences and reactions, this gap of time has almost disappeared” in the

Electric Age. Phone cameras, tablets, and so on, together with media technologies, enable

users recording and instantly sharing moments of personal everyday life, thus becoming

the merely extension of themselves and of their everydayness (cf. McLuhan 1989: 34-5).

Furthermore, McLuhan states: “With the reduction of time and space in the pattern of

events there is not only a great increase in the amount of data for daily experience, but

action and reaction tend to become fused” (McLuhan 1989: 78). Actors and spectators

18

merge in the simultaneity, instantaneously, at electric speed, whereby “public begins to

participate directly in actions which it had previously heard about at a distance in place or

time” (McLuhan 1989: 79).

Complementarily more than similarly, Goffman and McLuhan approach society and

communication from diverse perspectives; while McLuhan focuses on how media reshape

large cultural environments, but overlooks the specifics of social settings or social roles,

Goffman primarily concerns with the dynamics of face-to-face interaction, but has an

innocent understanding of media and the change in the settings or roles he describes

(Meyrowitz 2001).

However, if Goffman’s dichotomy – we are either in each other’s co-presence—aware of

being aware of each other—or we are alone (cf. Goffman 1967: 167) doesn’t leave much

room to the analysis of media, his micro-sociological perspective offers a remarkable

insight on the organization of the observable, everyday life behavior, usually but not

necessarily among the unacquainted in urban settings.

In light of this, actions are, for Goffman, “activities that are consequential, problematic, and

undertaken for what is felt to be their own sake”. Participants, users, customers, onlookers,

and whoever participates in actions engage so in a double process that refers to “two quite

distinct capacities: as someone who hazards or chances something valuable, and as

someone who must perform whatever activities are called for” (Goffman 1967: 185-186).

His emphasis on the movement between social spaces highlights the importance of the

recreation of the self in different environments; in this sense, Goffman depicts

extraordinary circumstances—out of everyday life, as means for developing the character

central to everyday life’s experience. We seek “serious action” to trigger otherwise

unattainable dimensions of our ”character” and to prove our poise and “composure”.

Hence, by choosing “action” we seem to have the control over our lives, and society tacitly

rewards action seekers by confirming and respecting their (fictitious) sense of autonomy.

As Goffman writes, “[i]t is as if the illusion of self-determinacy were a payment society

gives to individuals in exchange for their willingness to perform jobs that expose them to

risk” (Goffman 1967: 184).

Nevertheless, “action […] brings chance-caking and resolution into the same heated

moment of experience; the events of action inundate the momentary now with their

implications for the life that follows” (Goffman 1967: 261).

19

Kalantzis and Cope’s: Multiliteracy and Design Elements

Together with the performative turn, the linguistic turn in social sciences also experienced

significant developments throughout the last century. Particularly, the second half

absorbed the new criticisms produced by postmodernism, the philosophy of

poststructuralism, and deconstructionism.

As we have seen, the introduction of the notion of performativity highlighted a boarder shift

from the work-in-itself to the work-in-progress, and depicted a tendence towards change

and multivocality rather than permanence and arbitrariness.

The advent of media and visual technologies not only stimulated extended approaches to

society but also underscored the importance of new understandings of visual

communication, namely with the Gestalt psychology and the earlier explorations of Aldous

Huxley, among others.

Visual communication study embraces a wide range of aspects, from the basic physics of

light, the anatomy and physiology of the eye, cognitive and perception theories, color

theories and esthetics to natural reading patterns, design principles, semiotics, and so on.

To this extent, the multivocality of the visual means and its ability to communicate multiple

narratives activates simultaneously several elements; in such a context, content and

meaning are shared and shaped in a constant interplay among individual, media, and a

broad range of aspects.

Concerned with, how literacy pedagogy might address the rapid change in literacy due to

technology, globalization, and increasing cultural and social diversity, the New London

Group (NLG) (1996) introduced a framework within an individual who can identify, read,

and create new patterns of meaning using varying semiotic codes.

Multiliteracy, a term coined by the NLG, mirrors the multivocality of the visual means and

answers to the need of communicating (and teaching) in a world wherein the text is clearly

not the only and main way to create and share meaning; in fact, we create patterns of

meaning from the multiliteracies around us by using and re-design the already available

design, which includes the grammars of language, various semiotic codes, film,

photography and gesture, among others.

In semiotics, the “study of sign” in its simplest form, a concept of something cannot exist

without being named; however, texts may employ one or more semiotic (sign, symbol,

code) systems.

Hence, seeing semiotic system as grammars for different modes of communication,

Kalantzis and Cope (2012) suggested six design elements in the meaning making

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process, which include different semiotic codes such as (I) Linguistic meaning; (II) Visual

meaning; (III) Audio meaning; (IV) Gestural meaning; (V) Spatial meaning; and the (VI)

Multimodal patterns of meaning that are combinations of the above semiotic codes.

Moreover, each design element incorporates five aspects: Reference (what do the

meanings refer to?); Interaction (how do the meanings connect the people in the action

and the people who are communicating?); Composition (how does the overall meaning

hold together?); Context (how are the meanings shaped by where they are situated?); and

purpose (whose interests do these meanings serve?).

Analysing Guerrilla #1: Have a Break with Kit Kat

Guerrilla advertising tries to break with “traditional” advertising strategies not only in a

financial sense but also, and most evidently, in the centrality that its audience (target and

onlooker) occupies as both part of the action and mere spectator of it.

Kit Kat, Nestlé. New Zeeland (2010) and Netherlands (2013).

In summer 2010, the Nestlé’s famous wafer biscuit bar Kit Kat, together with the

advertising agency JWT New Zealand, created a singular guerrilla ad campaign:

strategically placed at the entrance of parks and squares, street posters made of plywood

were transformed by users into chairs.

While pulling out each piece form the billboard, the Kit Kat poster reveals the famous

brand’s red color, and it can be assembled into a six-piece chair to be used during the

several summer open-air concerts, events, gatherings, and so on.

21

Both advertisements put a strong accent on the Kit Kat slogan “Have a Break, Have a Kit

Kat”; their multimodal patterns engage with visual meaning as well as gestural and spatial

ones. Particularly, the visible space plays a great role in relation to the audience: the

posters and the “No Wi-Fi” areas are positioned in strategic points of a city; wherein the ad

is enabled to activate also the hidden one through the interaction with its audience. The

chair and the benches are utilized as symbols for rest, leisure, entertainment, and

conviviality; the user stands, more or less consciously, in a highly interactive position

among other users, the surrounding environment and the object itself.

The audience is obviously free to take part of the action or not, to observe it or to just walk

by. Users can attribute to the advertisement different meanings, as well as no meaning;

the (potentially) shared experience among the partakers, and among the different media in

the era of media technologies, is, however, among the primary intentions of commercial

advertisement.

In fact, one of the first contradiction in this case lies in the fact that Nestlé perfectly knows

that the world is actually connected, and the guerrilla ad campaigns can work perfectly as

business strategy in this sense: the resulting visibility the enterprise obtains through local

and national newspapers, online magazines, social networks, and the mere “word-of-

mouth” among costumers and onlookers is invaluable.

Analyzing Guerrilla #2: Street Ad

The relation between performance art and performance in general, performativity, and the

business world is even more evident in the famous diatribe between the well-known

England-based graffiti artist and political activist Banksy and the Swedish multinational

company IKEA.

In 2009, a controversial graffiti piece of Banksy appeared in Croydon, London: a punk

young boy is looking at IKEA [IEAK]’s directions while trying to assemble a “Large Graffiti

Slogan”.

Ironically, on the occasion of the Milan Design Week in 2012, IKEA launched the slogan

“People make design come to life” and combined it with an extended guerrilla advertising

campaign.

For the occasion, the IKEA creative team created stencils shamelessly inspired by

Banksy’s and Obey’s (famous US illustrator and street artist) styles and pasted it over their

billboards. All over the subway system, the black and white stencils had a great effect in

22

complimenting the colorful IKEA posters and transforming them into eye-catching

messages.

The stenciled-posters were also glued on turnstiles, stair-steps, and floors; the action was

officially filmed, and spread around the Internet, on the official IKEA Youtube channel, and

so on. This way, they managed to reach an extended audience that goes far beyond the

Milan Metro.

Banksy. IKEA Punk. London (2009). IKEA. Milan, Italy

(2012).

The audience’s degree of participation, thus, significantly differs in relation to the previous

examples.

Further, willfully playing on the illegal aspect of graffiti, IKEA’s guerilla ad engages with

typical performance’s components. Particularly, those of mystification and

misrepresentation are crucial: the audience is maintained in a social distance from the

action, in a state of both admiration and dread in regard to the performer; the exclusionary

aspect of the action is actually inclusion within the overall guerrilla ad strategy.

Misrepresentation is also crucial. The IKEA guerrilla ad talks public and makes a false

statement; the power-takers, the agents, make a use of different semiotics codes in order

to convey a misrepresentative reality. The capacity of misrepresentation is part of a

broader concern for meaning and/or intentionality: once the audience has meaning, in fact,

Again, the grammar of the space is

central in the ad concept, and the spatial

and gestural design patterns are

perhaps more important than the visual

ones. In fact, the referential space (the

subway and the street) is highly

strategically chosen, and the analogy to

illegal graffiti activities is deliberately

performed. The particular use of gestural

design elements underscores the

analogy: the gesture-makers (the

fictional street artists that IKEA enrolled

to perform), their bodily features and

gestural resemblances are to maintain

the audience in a role of onlooker that is,

however, central in the meaning-making

process.

23

it will be able to expend it (individually or commonly) within each one’s individual

description, explanation and understanding of reality (cf. Dretske 1993). In other words,

the spectator will be move back from liminality to reaggregation.

Ultimately, the advertisement was successfully received, and the brand image of IKEA

gained a lot in visibility (and money, of course). Ironically, being graffiti activities illegal,

IKEA did not have to pay any copyright to Banksy.

Performing Advertising: The Paradox

The last example from IKEA and Banksy clearly shows how business and marketing

strategies learnt from the field of performance art, and performance more generally, how to

be creative and achieve the performative quality of work.

Guerrilla advertising challenges the norms and rules of conventional advertisement by

applying performance’s and arts’ modus operandi, materials, and techniques to business.

Particularly, it uses performance to highlight the absurdities, the liminalities of life and to

point at the idiosyncrasies of human behavior.

For this purpose, guerrilla advertising takes deeply into account the various psychological

aspects of its audience: the performative modus reflects, thus, the necessity for a more

universal language that uses multimodal patterns of meaning. Hence, performance

becomes a tool, a means of brand experience: shifting attention from the commercial

object to the customer, the conveyed idea is that the advertisement exists in real space

and real time.

More specifically, it generally exists in the present time and in the actual space, and is

conveyed through a performing object, body, picture, video, and so on, that share and

shape the meaning in the relationship with its audience.

As we have see in McLuhan, media technologies such as smart phones and tablets have

contributed in blurring the tempo-spatial distances between action and re-action, and so

those between liminality and reaggregation. The overwhelming simultaneity of

happenings, thus, contributes to the misrepresentative function of guerrilla events in

guiding the spectator into a mediated reality, which yet he perceives as individually

experienced.

On the other hand, however, guerrilla advertising betrays the primary nature of

performance (art) as critique to the status quo, namely in its antithesis to theater and the

Saussurean tradition in linguistics.

24

The omnipresence of the profit-making aspect characterizes the overall purpose of the ad

(here, a difference between commercial and, for instance, socially or politically engaged

advertising may be allowed).

To this extent, guerrilla advertising challenges and rejects norms and rules in a modus of

action, i.e. in a thought-provoking, unconventional, challenging and potentially interactive

way, as we have seen, but aiming to promote the established system rather than arguing

it.

Conclusions

Commercial guerrilla communication refers to an attempt to provoke subversive effects

through interventions (actions) in the process of communication. It differs, however, from

other kinds of political action (e.g. political performance art, happenings, social

movements, etc.) because it is not based on the critique of the dominant discourses but on

the interpretation of the signs in a different way.

The New London Group’s notion of multiliteracies approaches language in this sense:

firstly, it responds to the variability of meaning making in different cultural, social or

domain-specific contexts; and, secondly, it provides new linguistic approaches to a

meaning that is made in increasingly multimodal ways—in which written-linguistic modes

of meaning interface with oral, visual, audio, gestural, tactile and spatial patterns of

meaning. These variables and differences are becoming ever more significant to our

communications environment in everyday life.

By trying to represent reality, guerrilla advertising reflects those language synesthetic

relations, and it takes inspirations from the existing here-and now, from the present time

and space, always relying on its audience response and evaluation through different

extents of participation.

In terms of marketing, the American journalist Warren Berger explains unconventional

guerrilla-style advertising as "something that lurks all around, hits us where we live, and

invariably takes us by surprise" (Berger 2001: 430). The element of surprise, in a sense of

amazement and astonishment as well as of dread and fear, is central for the

accomplishment of a guerrilla ad. In fact, the success of this kind of unconventional

advertising campaigns may rely on their capability “to create verisimilitude enough to draw

the client out from what dulls the ability to feel, thus to consider all that life offers. The

surprises of social life are there, after all, around and before us at every turn, waiting. It

requires creativity, flexibility and a willingness to take a little risk” (Lemert 1997: xi).

25

The different choice between conventional (e.g. television broadcast, print ads) and

unconventional advertising strategies, as we have seen, does merely refer to financial

aspects, being traditional advertising notoriously expensive and completely unaffordable

by medium-small business.

However, considering the phenomena on a linguistic level, guerrilla and ambient

advertising find also additional pros: the involvement they engage with audience, for

instance, normally prompts dialogue, that is, they tend toward generating multivocal and

multimodal meaning-making processes.

Moreover, by putting the focus on smaller and target groups in their own environments, the

guerrilla advertising seems to reallocate a certain prestige in the singular experience of the

everyday life space in the era of globalized spaces.

For this purpose, the subversive experience of space is of high relevance; the experience

of reality as grounded terrain for action and interpretation, in confront to the

commercialized reality, draws performance’s original antithesis to the semiotized space of

theatre in the name of an art that “rejects form, which is immobility, and opts, instead, for

discontinuity and slippage” (Féral 2002: 100-101).

In fact, although performance began using the materials of theatre, its codes and its

bodies, it firmly denied narrativity, and it attempted not to tell, but rather to provoke

synaesthetic relationships between subjects (cf. Féral 1982).

To a very similar extent, guerrilla advertising adopts performance (art)’s disruptive

potential, its techniques and tool, and combines them to the needs and norms of the

industrial market.

Nevertheless, the result may be, as in the Banksy case, a paradoxical statement:

commercial guerrilla advertising is performative as it is a semiotic expression that

produces reactions, results, or real consequences in extra-semiotic reality, and it draws its

main tools and technique from the field of performing arts; however, it utilizes them

seeking for reactions that are not actually free and spontaneous, yet directed to a

reaffirmation of the existing power relationships.

26

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