With that simple catchphrase back in 1999, Sam Ewen and the folks at Eisnor Interactive launched a stealthy marketing campaign to announce The Mining Company's name change to About.com.

Before anyone knew what the hell they were talking about or what the phrase meant, they had plastered the slogan on park benches and train stops, even spray painted it on sidewalks.

By the time the two-week campaign was over (it even got airtime on NBC's Today Show), the About.com re-branding was complete, along with the site's accompanying traffic spike, and Eisnor had helped push the term of art known as guerilla marketing to a wider audience.

That was then, before the online ad market downturn would lead to the demise of Eisnor Interactive. But with buzz marketing all the rage, Ewen and former Performance Event Marketing president Michael Glickman are moving from stealth mode to launch Interference, Inc., a firm specializing in the guerilla marketing tactics that worked for dot-com clients like About.com and HotJobs.com.

Interference, Inc. will use street corner messengers, product samplings, publicity stunts, branded hitchhikers and other "random acts of kindness," anything to deliver a targeted message to a specific market.

Unfazed by the general softness in the ad industry, Ewen is confident this is a ripe space for business. This time, he intends to avoid Eisnor's mistakes and focus on traditional (offline) clients.

With assistance from ad agency Merkley Newman Harty & Partners, which is helping with office space and access to big-name clients, Interference Inc. has already done projects for Audible, Inc. Motts, Nickelodeon, Universal One Card and New York Magazine.

In today's Q&A feature, Ewen raps about the tricks to a successful guerilla marketing campaign, the general state of the advertising industry, and the buzz the About.com campaign created:

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Q: How exactly does one measure the effectiveness of a typical guerilla marketing campaign?

There are quite a few ways to tell if a campaign is working or not. If there is a promotion involved, you can use a promotion code, a unique URL or a special 800 number to track actual responses. Or, you can look at actual sales during the time of the campaign. If it's more like a brand building campaign, you look at general traffic at a site or store. The neat thing about guerilla marketing is that the media can buy into it and the campaign becomes the story.

Recently, for HotJobs.com, we went into the Seattle market where they hadn't done much in the way of marketing. They had only done advertising in that market on television. We did our thing on the street corner with "evangelists" atop soap boxes and they got a generous spike in traffic from the Seattle market. So, that's a direct way of telling whether it's working or not.

Q: Guerilla marketing has that obtrusive element that can hurt a campaign too. What's the trick to make sure it's appealing and not annoying?

If you put the effort into the campaign, it isn't obtrusive at all. Of course, there is good and bad marketing. The goal is not just to be there but to be there at the right time and in the right place.

If you're on your way to work in the morning and someone hands you a free cup of coffee with a promotional message, that's something can catch your eye. But, we're not going to give you free tickets to a comedy club at 7:30 in the morning. Good guerilla marketers target you for who you are and what you like to do.

Q: Seems your timing is a little off? I'm sure you saw the memo that the ad market is down in the dumps now. Are you confident this market will improve enough to make your business a hit?

I don't think the ad market is dead at all. Even online, if someone can run an ad campaign well, it can still be effective. We have to find new, creative and innovative ways to get people's attention. Web users have phased out the banner ad in their minds. So, now we're getting the pop-unders and takeover ads. There will always be advertising but it has to be new and creative. It's harder to make an impact today than it was five years ago but there is room for us.

Besides, guerilla marketing is a specialized field. It allows the marketer to control the quality of an impression in a direct, one-on-one way. We can target consumers at those times when they're open to being talked to. It is not as passive as television or radio. That gives us an advantage.

Where do you find the actual marketers to go dish the message on the street corners?

We have a database of actors, models and promo people all across the country. When we get a target market, we tap that database. We've done work in about 65 markets so far and we can add to that easily.

While guerilla marketing is mostly done in bigger and busier cities, it can be even more effective in smaller markets where there is the novelty element involved in giving away a cup of coffee with a marketing message. You can still make a very big splash in New York or San Francisco but, the campaign needs to be bigger and louder. In the smaller markets, however, you can affect a lot of people with a very small budget. That is where I think we can find our niche.

Q: What's the single most exciting campaign you were involved in?

When Eisnor did the About.com name change, that was a lot of fun. The industry was so ready for it. They were moving from The Mining Company and adopting the About.com name and they were committed to making as much relevant noise as possible. We had 100 people on that campaign working every day for a month in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Plus, we created about seven or eight alternative media outlets.

We called 10,000 workplace phone numbers in the middle of the night when no one was there. It was simple. We left 10,000 voicemails just saying: "Hello, is anybody out there?" and hung up. It was a lot of fun. We were able to do what we do best...