You never know when some viral urban campaign would come around the corner and whack you with some bizarre message.
More interesting ones may even capture your thoughts long after the first visual shock subsides. More often than not, it’s just a smart product placement / promotion, but in some cases – truly subversive and genuine urban art.
Streets in Portugal seem to be the most often visited by creative mayhem:
(once you approach these stabbed victims, they will hand you a promo flyer…)
There is not too much I consider to be too over the top, but this is pretty bad. The other marketing gimmicks highlighted on Dark Roasted Blend are hilarious, offensive and/or shocking (depending on your point of view). Check out the print ad of Hitler eating Chinese food under a slogan saying “Can’t hate everything”. Yeesh.
More like “urban disturbing.” Give him a ticket and start the clock ticking.
Guerrilla marketing gone horribly wrong.
When is this going to be on one of the CSI’s where he really is stabbed?
I’m pretty sure I would have started dialing 911 before I even got to him. I would love to see what the emergency services would say about this man pretending to need help.
Exactly.
After he hands the flyer, is it still okay to stab him?
#7. Yep, leave him WISHING he’d only been stabbed in the back.
That guy would be arrested in the US.
Well I was told by one First Aid Instructor that to kick someone if you are unsure of the situation.
Never hear of “Death of a Salesman”?
So, if someone were to call the police or the paramedics for this guy, would he have to pay for it, or would the tax payer foot bill? I think one could make an argument these people pose a risk to public safety.
It does seem to me that this is at least as much performance art as marketing. It may be offensive art, but it is art. Something like this couldn’t work as an ongoing marketing campaign, for the reason noted in one of the previous comments, that authorities wouldn’t tolerate it. Even in a society where the authorities were less controlling and there was more reliance on individual responsibility and social mores, instead of coercively enforcing “proper” behavior via the law, people would rapidly learn to ignore a person lying “stabbed” in the street, or better yet mess with it by pretending to take it at face value.
Nice way to increase Kitty Genovese Syndrome…