Guerilla Marketing

I was at a surprise birthday party this afternoon for a friend of mine who's currently at Google, and his former cmu roomate brought up the topic of a suspected guerilla marketing attempt on him while riding the BART. The woman sitting next to him took out a device called the oqo, a new micro-windows tablet device launched by a former Apple product designer. She started extolling the virtues of the device without any solicitation from him. If it was some sort of planted tactic, he just realized he was spreading the word about the device as he's retelling us the story. People here are pretty keen to guerilla tactics by corporations. Remember the PSP grafitti campaign a few months ago? Actual street artists defaced the Sony "graffiti" outside Zeitgeist, just down the street from me. In a recent find, companies as prominent as Volkswagen have started creating MySpace "profiles" for their products. I'm surprised more people aren't in an uproar about VW tainting the "integrity" of MySpace. Cue sarcasm.