Roberto is a 33-year old creative director at one of the city’s top ad agencies. In his spare time he plays in a local band, meets with friends to talk film, and runs his own website. He smokes occasionally, is out four nights a week and makes enough money to afford an apartment in the trendiest neighbourhood in town. But Roberto detests commercials.

In fact, he goes out of his way to turn them off. Direct mailings? Forget it  straight into the bin. And bottle-top promotions? Please. He’s an ideas man, an early adopter, someone other Creatives look up to. He's aV anguard and some companies desperately want to recruit him as a brand ambassador. But this is no easy egg to crack.

Buzzed and branded

Like the 49ers digging for gold in mid-1800s America, marketers know their nugget is out there. Sifting through the populace for a rare Vanguard stone, however, is no simple task. For many brands, buzz marketing has been the answer.

Buzz marketing states that we not only reach Roberto, but we also enlist him as a trendsetter to subtly push and talk up the brand to friends and admirers. By coordinating this current of communication, marketers simply hope to replicate the pattern set by sudden sensations such as the independent film The Blair Witch Project, the Harry Potter book series and the rebirth of Puma. In each case, the buzz that seemed to come from out of nowhere transformed what otherwise would have been a niche product into a mass phenomenon.

This is the great pursuit of buzz marketing, where brand come-ons are veiled like a hunter in the bush and where consumers are lured into the task of moving the heard. Sure, generating great buzz for their products has been the holy grail of marketers since PT Barnum famously exclaimed: Come see the great Egris. But today the stakes are much higher.

Since that time, a virtual who’s who of traditional advertisers have stepped up to the buzz marketing plate: Ford, Hasbro, Lucky Strikes, VF Corp, IBM and Vespa, just to name a few.
For example, rather than saturating the airways with TV commercials for its Focus subcompact, Ford Motor Co. recruited a handful of trendsetters in a few markets and gave them each a Focus to drive for six months.

Their duties? Simply to be seen with the car and to hand out Focus-themed trinkets to anyone who expressed interest in it.  Who is lucky enough to get a free car like this? The influencers or as they sayin Spain, the Vanguardista Urbano No Convencional or VUNCs.

Let's get VUNC-y

Daniel Calabuig, Director of Madrid-based buzz marketing company, Seis Grados, has been tracking the elusive VUNC for years with the skilled prowess of a big-game huntsman.

He tells me, VUNCs are people who are close to the creative movement of the city. They work in creative workplaces, with creative people, or they are at least close to this kind of work. They work in advertising, design, art, music, literature they could even work in bars, clubs and discos. Secondly, besides their creative work, they are well-connectedd —they need to know a lot of people to do their work.

To reach the VUNCs, Seis Grados, like many buzz marketing companies, gets creative. "The first thing we are doing is trying to contact them at real determined points of contact such as exclusive events like, for example, in Barcelona recently, at the first trade show of Trend Magazine. It wasn't a very crowded event, but Trend Magazine is all over the world, so many VUNCs came for the three days to show their work."

Seis Grados siezed the opportunity to build brand awareness for one of their tobacco clients, whom they wish to keep anonymous. Instead of being overbearing and overt, they created an interactive art installation. People could record images and music just by moving their bodies, Calabuig explains.
 
To participate people had to exchange their email, so we could send them what they created. This way, we had their email and a viable next point of contact.

Buzz marketers must tread lightly though, for like a woodsman up wind or a fisherman who jumps clumsily into the water, a sure-fire way to induce a frantic VUNC exodus is to be obtrusive with your message. They want something smart, says Calabuig.

Luckily for the Trend Magazine event, Seis Grados chose subtlety. At the entrance of the interactive installation, there was a poster simply saying,  Have we met?. At the exit there was another sign that said 'By the way, my name is.' It was something understated and smart, and not overt.

Genesis of the vanguard

With all the doctors, lawyers, businessmen and women around, creative types tend to be in the minority. According to Calabuig, about eight per cent of the population in Barcelona could be considered as Vanguardistas.

Still, many brands make the mistake of attempting to fit the VUNC into a specific demographic based on age, gender or religion. It’s an attitude, says Calabuig. It could be a man or woman who is 20 or 30 or 50  it doesn’t matter. Their career is about what’s happening, it’s who they are. They want to be updated and connected. They are aware of what is happening  they have to be.

But artists and creative types, as the stereotype goes, aren’t exactly overrun with spending cash. So why the fuss? They influence more people than a normal person. They have a very high communication potential, explains Calabuig. It’s that communication potential which brands are hoping to plug into.

Successes and lessons
The social sway of the VUNC can be particularly valuable for brands that have certain limitations when it comes to their ability to market in traditional media such as television and print  prime examples being alcohol and tobacco brands.

Yet, VUNCs can also appeal to such well-known brands as Nike and Sony Playstation, who want to expand their reach substantially without losing their steet cred. As such, they tend to use separate communication strategies: one appealing to the mainstream and the other to VUNCs.

This two-pronged approach has paid dividends for Sony Playstation. Seis Grados has been one of the agencies helping Playstation influence VUNCs online during new video game or product launches. Says Calabuig, VUNCs are hungry for information and actively searching for it. They use the Internet to get informed before other people.

Marketers of course are attempting to quantify how often their message will be passed along and how many downstream consumers they’ll have to influence before a fad is born. VF Corp. contacted 200,000 carefully selected web surfers in the opening stage of a buzz campaign for its Lee Dungarees. Within four months, they tracked that 436,000 visitors had made their way to their specially created game site.

Over buzzed
"Given the essentially uncontrollable nature of buzz, there is always the risk of a backlash. Our clients have to know that if you are trying to be subversive and you are found out, it can be dangerous," says Scott Leonard, CEO of ADD Marketing Inc., an agency that uses street teams and chat-room cyber-reps to spread hot, not-always-flattering gossip about client company recording artists.

Even Big Blue had a run in with the law after one of its agencies stenciled wordless images of a peace symbol, heart, and penguin on Chicago and San Francisco sidewalks to build buzz for its Peace Love Linux effort. The resulting flood of media coverage did more than pay for itself, but IBMs portrayal as a corporate vandal probably wasn’t the image it was looking for, or was it?

And no, not everyone is happy with the covert marketing trend. Many critics decry it as a form of cultural corruption at a time when advertising already pervades the landscape. It’s a much more insidious kind of development, because now, all of a sudden, marketers are creating culture on the grassroots level, on the streets and in the places people live, says Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters magazine and an orchestrator of media democracy protests against multinational marketers.

But the fact that the media landscape is so saturated is exactly why buzz marketing, and for that matter, the anti-corporate mindset of the VUNCs exist. How else can marketers reach this influential, yet fickle, group?

As long as marketers are handing out free cars, iced coffee and cigarettes, the VUNC probably won’t mind as long as the brand doesn’t get too pushy, that is. Because as soon as a VUNC detects corporate courtship, they are on the move. Then it’s time for the search to begin all over again. Happy hunting.