Guerrilla marketing means to accomplish an advertising goal without spending much money. (I think I’ve made it clear that I am into free whenever I can get it, right?) When I started my film company there wasn’t much … more like none.
When I was trying to help the ski club sponsors of my feature-length ski films, they never had any money either. So, to promote their shows I gave them at least 100 four-color posters, a dozen different press release stories, and some 8 by 10, black and white photos to get placed in local newspapers. Also in my free press kit, as it is called now, were 1- and 3-minute, 16mm news clips that they could try to get on local television free.
Here are a couple of examples of how creative some ski club members were in the 1950s through the 1980s because by that time most all of my show dates for personal appearances were all booked and the sponsors of long standing knew where they could go and get free press.
Two things I learned early in business were to supply free posters and a preview of the show for distribution by the sponsor.
One of the early marketing tools was to get three or four ski shops to sell tickets and give them a booth in the lobby and then they would tell everyone who walked into their store to buy a ticket to see the show and their latest merchandise.
The Cascade Ski Club in Portland, Ore., led by Howard Hermanson, was most successful at making as much money on the ski shop booth displays as selling tickets. They were able to finance a new septic system at the club house up in the Cascades fondly known as the Warren Miller Memorial Sewer System.
Hal Roberts of the Peninsula Ski Club in the San Jose area found the inserts in my giveaway program so easy to sell locally that he started printing a four-page insert that over the years had so many pages he started inserting my 64-page program inside of his larger advertising booklet. Hal distributed them from Sacramento to Cupertino at all of my shows including the sound on film versions that I didn’t attend and narrate live.
In another location, a ski club sponsor got into a women’s ski outfit and with old-fashioned steel roller skates nailed to the bottom of his skis was pulled through town during the lunch hour behind a motorcycle while wearing a long blonde wig and a ski outfit. Stretched out on the tow rope between the two of them was a double-sided banner announcing the movie name, date, time and location. They also used a loud speaker that could be heard for at least a block to announce my movie was coming. They exited the street by pulling into underground parking and the roller skater climbed into his car and drove silently away.
I was always surprised that none of this type of marketing occurred east of Colorado even though most of it in the late years was copied by me and sent to Eastern sponsors.
In a market as large as Los Angeles, paid advertising is too expensive to afford for a one-night show and so those sponsors depended on their local small giveaway newspapers for free editorial space and anything I could personally promote on TV. In the 1970s, there was a weekly ski TV show in the Los Angeles area and the emcee, Tom Malone, could use some of my free programming, so I gave him a couple of my ski resort promotional films to use. He wrote his own script for my film and did the narration personally instead of using mine that was already recorded on the sound track with a musical background.
The best job of Guerrilla marketing I ever saw for one of my shows was in Corvallis, Ore., in the early 1950s. A member of the ski club that sponsored the show also was a good mountain climber. He rented a room on the top floor of the tallest hotel in town and the first thing he did when he got to the room was to tie a nylon mountain climbing rope to the bathroom plumbing. He then called the local television station and told them that he was going to jump out of the top floor window of the hotel and commit suicide. As soon as the TV crew showed up and had their cameras unpacked, he called the police and watched the crowd grow in size from his top floor room as the sirens came screeching to the front of the building. Then, he opened his hotel window and started rappelling down. When he got a signal from another club member in the crowd that the TV cameras were rolling, he pulled a ripcord in his rucksack and a 25-foot long banner fell out announcing my movie that night at the local high school. The audience that night, as a result of that banner, was one of the first standing room only crowds that I ever had.
In southern Oregon that year, this was called a prank and it hit the TV screens all over the Northwest at no cost to anyone except a 50 cent roll of white shelf paper.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or visit his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller.
