Just as the Silicon Valley Internet economy was heating up in 1998, I remember attending a training session on Guerilla Marketing. It wasn’t a new concept by any means. Jay Conrad wrote the first edition of his book on the subject in 1984. However, it certainly seemed to permeate our sights and sounds during the late 1990's.

In the past couple of weeks, I have seen a couple of interesting examples of the return of the guerillas. On May 20th, some friends headed up to San Francisco with us for the annual Bay to Breakers race. I use the term “race” loosely. This event is a bona fide 12 kilometer race for a few world-class visitors from Kenya. But, trailing behind them are tens of thousands of hooligans (yes, us included) who basically walk the distance in a huge moving party that traverses the city together. This party is reminiscent of Halloween, as many people are in costume.

Amongst the masses were a couple of opportunistic advertisers for MySpace and Google. The MySpace guys created huge cardboard cutouts of example MySpace profiles, leaving a hole where their face could protrude where the profile picture would normally go. The Google guys were carrying a big sign that waved up above the crowd, reading “Google Engineering is Hiring,” and listing an email address. I’d love to know if that generated any qualified resumes…I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.

Last night, I arrived at the San Jose airport after a trip and I noticed that site search and navigation provider SLI Systems hung five posters in the Terminal C baggage claim to target people who were in town for the Internet Retailer IRCE 2007 Show. I’m pretty sure that the San Jose airport doesn’t sell advertising space there (but it’s possible), so it looked like another successful guerrilla tactic.

Who knows what will be next? Maybe you’ll see the WhatCounts brand in an unexpected place someday soon ; )