Swine flu panic is just a week old and like most Americans you probably have only one thing on your mind: how can I make some sweet fast cash off this thing? Enter guerrilla marketing.

Guerrilla marketing firms are paid to identify hot new trends and think outside the box. So a New York outfit called GoGorilla Media had a genius idea earlier today. See, everyone is completely freaking out about the deadly swine flu and rushing to protect themselves with (utterly useless) surgical masks. Why not print brand names on the front of those masks and turn these panicky people into brand ambassadors? Seriously, that's the word they used. Because there are no more masks at drug stores (they say), they'll put together street teams to hand them out to people who believe that wearing a company's logo over their mouth is a small price to pay for not dying. It's really a win-win.

The pitch they sent out to clients is below, followed by the obligatory apology email that went out a few hours later in which the CEO, Alan Wolan, concedes that "the concept was not as clever as I had originally thought." No shit.


Of course, since we're dealing with guerilla marketers, we must add that it's perfectly posssible that the original idea was simply a ruse to get a blog like this one to pick up their email and thereby get their name out there. If that's the case, it worked. We all now know that GoGorilla is run by an idiot. Nice work.