WLAN Guerilla Marketing

Using guerilla tactics for advertising and brand communication is anything but a new approach. We already got used to the neverending war for attention discovering the public space as a new battleground. Anyhow, it brought forth a lot of refreshening ideas and still keeps us facing up to the discussion about the importance of public spaces and the borders which define it.

Lately I read on public.beta about another way to infiltrate public areas in an invisible but nevertheless efficient way. The guys of the well-known German agency Jung von Matt installed a strong public WiFi at the Hamburg airport and used the SSIDs to communicate the special offers and exact location of the SIXT car rental agency's airport desk, which is just one place to go beside the ones of more than five competing companies. After having connected to one of the multiple SIXT WiFi access points the user's browser is led straight to a site which provides information about the current offers.

In view of the mass of mobile devices which are used in areas of waiting like airports this idea is a nice alternative to printed ads which disappear into the crowd. Christian, author of the public.beta blog, refers in his article to the Amsterdam based agency THEY. They did a similar campaign. Eric Hemaez from The Third Screen concludes after having made his own experience with SSID advertising:

«Now that the secret is out, I see a trend taking shape. Can it be long before Google starts aggregating the rights to use SSID names and reselling them to online advertisers?»

He wrote this article over a year ago. And honestly we all are glad that this «revolution» hasn't been that powerful and overwhelming as Eric guessed it would be. The SIXT campain is the right thing in the right place. But no one of us wants to scroll through long lists of ads to find the right WiFi to connect to.