Fun, weird, wild and wacky marketing ideas

[John Rogers]

I don't recall all of the specifics as I read about this strategy for piggybacking on a competitor's advertising many years ago.

The most popular furniture store on a high traffic street in a large city was running a lot of TV spots.  A competing store was located a few streets over from the popular store. The competing store spotted a high visibility building wall on the way to and near the popular store. The competing store paid the building owner for the rights to paint advertising with a competing message for their own store on the side of the building. Everyone driving to the popular store couldn't help but see the advertising (with an arrow indicating where to turn) for the competing store. The competing store was able to piggyback on the popular store's TV spots and successfully divert traffic to their own store.