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Pumpkin-Carving Stunt Stops Times Square Travelers

A stunt for Scholastic Media saw a schoolteacher perched on a stool in Times Square on Halloween to see if he could break his Guinness Book record for carving pumpkins.

He managed to draw 3,200 bystanders to watch him achieve his goal, in a gimmick that publicized Scholastic Media’s first interactive console game, Goosebumps HorrorLand, writes Brandweek. (The article rounds up some of the most inventive guerrilla stunts of the year.)

The Goosebumps HorrorLand stunt worked because it gave people something else to think about besides the lousy economy and the digital device in their hands, says Interference Inc. founder Sam Ewen, the agency that planned the event. Drew Neisser, CEO of Renegade Marketing, agrees that what works in guerrilla marketing today is not just what’s surprising, but what’s participatory and engaging. “Guerrilla marketing has to be more than disruptive. It has to be appealing enough that someone in a walking cocoon actually wants to stop and engage.”

Renegade staged what it called the “Fashion Coast Guard” for Nautica. Brand reps “rescued” 40,000 “fashion shipwrecks” by giving them Nautica coupons on the streets of Atlanta, Charlotte and Durham, N.C.