Fake Guerilla Ads

Guerilla-style Napster ads have begun appearing on flyposters around NYC. It’s the familiar old Napster-head logo, in a six or eight inch sticker version.

The idea is to make it look like a guerilla campaign – you know, Napster is back, and our users are so cool and excited that everyone is slapping these little stickers on existing ads. Thing is, the ads aren’t real. They’re fake ads, even slightly satirical. Remember the Energizer bunny ads where the bunny would come marching into another fake commercial? That sort of thing.

Weird part about it is that the fakeness of the ads – they’re actually posters with Napster stickers stuck on them, not guerilla events at all – mirrors the new place of Napster in a for-profit music distribution scheme.

Just as the ads are condoned, real, ads based on a former guerilla tactics, the Napster distribution system will be a condoned, real business based on its former self.

I’m not commenting on the good or bad of this – just the unintentional meta-theatricality of the moment.