We’re not moving very fast are we? Come on, bus driver! Lets get going! Can a bus actually be slower than a running chicken? …Strange visitor from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men…. or just another aspiring comic waiting for that phone call…the big break…. Its not easy to become a pop culture fixture, to be something hip and relational yet removed from the idiom that t.v. pitchman Billy Mays explored. Its guerrilla marketing. Unconventional promotion intended to get maximum exposure from minimal resources, and its usually backed by video and “spreadable” to use Henry Jenkins term, over different media platforms. The originator of guerrilla marketing may have been Edward Bernays in his promotion of cigarettes for women in his “Torches of Freedom” campaign. But….you’ve come a long way baby…..
Hey, bus driver, speed up a little bit
Speed up a little bit
Speed up a little bit
Hey, bus driver, speed up a little bit
All around the town
---The M42 bus is so slow, a grown man on a child's Big Wheel-like trike can beat it across midtown. Mark Malkoff, 35, challenged one of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's notoriously sluggish buses in a mile race on 42nd St. from 10th Ave. to Madison Ave. and won by two minutes and 38 seconds Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/04/06/2011-04-06_big_wheel_leaves_midtown_bus_in_dust.html#ixzz1Ik57ZY8V
The 5-foot-7, 131-pound Malkoff set out at 1:18 p.m on Feb. 17 to test his pedal power against the MTA behemoth. Riding a Razor Rip Rider 360 he ordered off Amazon for $80, Malkoff waited for his unsuspecting opponent at the traffic light at 10th Ave. and 42nd St. “Once the green light went, the bus was destroying me,” Malkoff said. “Then we were neck and neck for a while, and suddenly I was able to propel myself faster.” Wearing a bicycle helmet, he made sure to obey all traffic signals as he rode in the street….
"I have a good relationships with the brands, the vast majority get what I do, and give me a lot of creative freedom. They understand the video has to be entertaining and feel like a natural fit. If not, it looks like a commercial, and people aren’t going to pay attention. Sometimes brands come and bring an idea, and if I need to be honest and say that’s not going to work, that’s what I’ll do. I’ve had plenty of projects come my way and the people behind them ask me “will this get TV coverage?”, and I’ve said no and had to turn them down." Read More:http://arikabel.com/
Comedic/ publicity gimmicks are not the exception for Malkoff. They are his bread and butter. Hey, it’s a living. The acts usually involves some form of urban mutational endurance activity where man vs. nature assumes a foe of economic importance: He once visited every Starbucks store in Manhattan (all 171 of them) on a single day, sampling something drink or food from each. Malkoff is also the man who attracted publicity when he lived in an Ikea home furnishings store for a week.
…”I was nervous about what the police would think, but … they just kind of smiled,” he said. He mounted a flip-camera to the handlebars and had a team of camera operators following him as he reached speeds of 4.7 mph. Malkoff made it to Madison Ave. in 12 minutes and 42 seconds. The bus took 15 minutes and 20 seconds to cover the same distance at an average of 3.9 mph.Read More:http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/04/06/2011-04-06_big_wheel_leaves_midtown_bus_in_dust.html
…Faster than a speeding bullet.
More powerful than a locomotive.
Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound….
ADDENDUM:
---Mark decided to do a 5-day fast from all technology to help break his social networking and other online addictions. In order to execute the ambitious campaign of ill-communication cleansing, he needed the proper and sacred venue to help hermit himself off from the world for all 120 hours. It was concluded the perfect place would be his pink-painted, 6x9 Queens, New York bathroom. With all that extra time, Mark made a bucket list of all the things he’s always wanted
o but hadn’t yet...a list limited by what he could accomplish in his lav. The list included writing down all the reasons he loved his wife, memorizing the map locations of all the nations in the world, memorizing the US presidents in order and, perhaps most lofty, learning how to play Poison’s #1 hit “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn” on the guitar. ---Read More:http://markowskisinmanhattan.blogspot.com/
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On June 30, 2009 Malkoff finished spending the month of June on an AirTran jet (a series of them, actually), flying to cities all over the country, but staying on the plane or tarmac the whole time. Malkoff said he did this to overcome his moderate fear of flying, although AirTran got something out of it. Malkoff is wrote and posted photos and videos about his experiences on a Web site, www.MarkOnAirTran.com.
And he did this all using a new wireless Internet service that AirTran was introducing, which is where the promotional aspect for the airline comes in. At night, Malkoff slept in the seats or aisle of whatever airplane he took his last flight on. Showers were not feasible so he cleaned up in the airplane lavatory with wet wipes and hand sanitizer, although he did have two “showers” on the tarmac of two different cities: in one case he was hosed down by a local fire department; in the other he was sprayed with a hose by ’70s pop singer Tony Orlando.
---On how he handled the ordeal and came out in such good spirits: "The whole thing was definitely challenging," revealed Malkoff. "It was this emotional journey of self exploration."---Read More:http://www.pennlive.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2009/08/02-week/
Malkoff had some diversions along the way: former Pittsburgh Steelers star Franco Harris was a fellow passenger on one flight (there’s a video of their conversation), and his brief excursions onto the tarmac have included racing radio-controlled toy cars with Danica Patrick, driving a John Deere tractor, and running a race against the Milwaukee Brewers sausages around the outside of the airplane.
Endurance events aren’t exactly new for Malkoff. He once visited every Starbucks store in Manhattan (all 171 of them) on a single day, sampling something drink or food from each.
Malkoff is also the man who attracted publicity when he lived in an Ikea home furnishings store for a week. But the AirTran project is a marathon event even for him.
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One man, George Washington Hill, president of American Tobacco, was worried about one social norm which had remained in place: it was illegal for women to smoke outside. In 1922, for instance, there was a famous incident where a woman was arrested in New York City for daring to light a cigarette on the street. Hill would not be considered much of a feminist, but he knew when he was not reaching all the customers he could. Women had a desire to smoke, but were only allowed to smoke in the privacy of their own homes.
"The Torches of Freedom campaign was a classic instance of using sexual liberation as a form of control. It proposed addiction as a form of freedom. In this, it was an early version of the Virginia Slims, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” campaign, which made repeated reference to the Suffragette movement as a way of associating cigarettes with freedom. " Read More:http://newfeministmediaresearch.blogspot.com/2008/06/torches-of-freedom.html
Thus it was that in 1928 George Washington Hill hired Eddie Bernays to expand his customer base for Lucky Strike cigarettes, particularly among women. Bernays hired a psychologist by the name of A.A. Brill, to find out what it was that drew women to smoking. Brill informed Bernays that in his view, cigarettes for women were a form of liberation, a sign of the new, free woman. Cigarettes were seen as something for men, and were a phallic symbol, for women then smoking was a sign of new feminine power as they took on roles which had traditionally been for men elsewhere: the vote they had just achieved, taking on men’s jobs, etc. From this Bernays crafted his idea for the “Torches of Freedom” campaign.
March 31, 1929. It was a big day in New York City, the day of the Easter Parade. A woman by the name of Bertha Hunt and several other women stepped into a crowd of people all wearing their Sunday best and lit cigarettes, at that time not only completely socially unacceptable.
Read More:http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/288980/the_torches_of_freedom_campaign_marketing.html
It just so happened that the press was there as Hunt and her friends were lighting up. Miss Hunt began explaining to the press how she had been told to extinguish her cigarette the other day, and how she had devised the idea of lighting up with her friends at the parade as a protest. The cigarettes were “torches of freedom,” a new step in the march towards equality of the sexes.Read More:http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/288980/the_torches_of_freedom_campaign_marketing.html
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