It's an Ad, Ad, Ad World

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For all of TV's reach, the real action in covert marketing is on the streets. Sony Ericsson has hired a troupe of actors this summer to pose as tourists in New York City and Los Angeles and to ask passers-by to take their picture with the company's new T68i, a combination cell phone and digital camera. Vespa promoted U.S. sales of its scooters last summer with a biker gang of beautiful people who were paid to ride them around such cities as Los Angeles and Houston.

Meanwhile, Big Fat Promotions, a stealth-marketing pioneer based in New York City, says (without naming its clients) that it has paid bar "leaners" to casually talk up the merits of certain liquors, doormen to pile up packages from a particular online catalog company in the lobby of their building, mothers to talk about a new laundry detergent at their kids' little-league games and commuters to play with a new PDA on the train home. Jonathan Ressler, 38, who founded Big Fat (one look at the loud, hulking New Jersey native, he says, and you will know where the name comes from), calls such maneuvers "brand baiting." He adds, "Buzz doesn't happen by accident. This is just real-life product placement."

So too, it might be argued, is seeding: giving new products to trendsetters to help build buzz. Fusion 5, a division of marketing giant WPP Group, gave advance models of the Ford Focus to employees of such celebrities as Adam Sandler and Madonna so the cars could be seen at hip places and parties around town. "We leverage the untapped power of word of mouth," says Matthew Stradiotto, cofounder of Matchstick, a Toronto firm that specializes in product seeding. Before a product launch, Matchstick hands out samples to key "influencers," a method credited with contributing to the success of sneaker launches by the likes of Adidas and Reebok.

Some marketers have found that they don't need people at all to spread the word. Even before the trendy energy drink Red Bull hit the shelves in England a few years ago, a London agency called Cake Creative Consultancy filled sidewalk trash cans and pub tables in Newcastle with empty cans of the stuff. Cake executives readily talk about the campaign, but in a sign of how sensitive stealth marketing has become, Red Bull claims, without elaboration, that the story is apocryphal.

Many of today's alternative approaches are clever updates of old techniques. As part of the launch of new talk shows hosted by Isaac Mizrahi and Carrie Fisher, respectively, women's cable network Oxygen has dispatched ice-cream trucks to cruise the streets of New York City and Los Angeles and give out specially labeled popsicles and vitamin waters touting the coming broadcasts. Procter & Gamble sent out a trailer of elegant, air- conditioned Porta Potties, complete with hardwood floors and aromatherapy candles, to state fairs last summer to extol the virtues of Charmin toilet paper. Bottled-water producer Evian paid to repair a run-down public pool in the London neighborhood of Brixton and tile the bottom with its brand name — a message that was hard to miss for passengers flying in and out of nearby Heathrow Airport.

It's all happening online too, as marketers look for alternatives to banner or pop-up ads. Some firms, such as Honda, IBM and Burger King, are turning to start-ups like YaYa to create "advergames"--online games that include a subtle or overt commercial message — to grab Web surfers' attention. And with the help of New York City software company ActiveBuddy, marketers such as Elle magazine and Capitol Records have created branded interactive agents that can chat online, provided that the Web surfers initiate the conversation.

And there are updates to the old bait-and-switch tactics. As part of the launch of a new car in Britain, Mercedes commissioned film director Michael Mann and Oscar-winning actor Benicio Del Toro to make an authentic-looking trailer featuring quick shots of the sleek new SL sedan for Lucky Star, a film about a slick guy blessed with mysterious luck that brings him women, fortune and fame. The trailer played on TV and in theaters across Britain in July. But the film it promotes doesn't exist — and only when viewers go to a website advertised in the trailer is the truth revealed. Lucky Star was clearly inspired by BMW's The Hire, a successful series of online short films that has ushered in a wave of similar projects from Ford and Chrysler and others.