The following is an interview between Mark Szabo, ace Strategy hack, and Susan Dioszeghy, associate media director with MacLaren McCann in Calgary.

The reader should be informed that the interviewer and interviewee are engaged in a feud which has been going on since distant memory serves.

They recently took time out to reflect on some learnings from a recent salvo that involved a unique outdoor execution that ridiculed the interviewer.

The billboard showed his likeness in some sort of pixie get-up, with his name printed with large letters across the bottom. The learnings from their discussion were thought to be instructive, or at least entertaining. Here is an excerpt.

Szabo: Ms. Dioszeghy, can you explain what this latest round of retribution in our ongoing feud involved?

Dioszeghy: Certainly. As you will recall, the offending party – you – placed an ‘I Love Alberta Beef’ sticker on my bumper, knowing full well the obsessive care with which I treat my car, and the fact that I’m a vegan.

S: That must have been very painful for you.

D: Completely.

S: That does not explain, however, why you felt it necessary to place a number of vertical neon yellow billboards with my likeness and name around the city. Clearly that was a gratuitous and disproportionate escalation of what was heretofore a harmless round of pranks. You made it turn ugly.

D: Well, ugly is your specialty, Szabo. If that is your real name.

S: More to the point, can you explain why we thought it necessary to bring this to light for the marketing cognoscenti of Canada?

D: For my part, it really reinforced my belief in outdoor. I have always been a strong advocate of using outdoor in the right circumstances, but sometimes we marketers can get removed from the impact of our work. Over the course of this mini-campaign to humiliate you, you have been good enough to forward me all the e-mails and voicemails you’ve been getting in response. It made me realize that this stuff really, really works.

S: For my part, I would have to agree. It’s quite remarkable, actually, given that the boards did not have my phone number or contact information. The first few weeks I got calls and e-mails from people I knew. But as this bitter little vendetta of yours has dragged on, I now get comments from people I don’t even know. I was in a recording studio last week and halfway through the session, the engineer turns to me and says, ‘So. What’s with the billboard?’

I was interviewing a co-ordinator two weeks ago and she asked the same thing. I’m even getting hits to my Web site and there’s NO CALL TO ACTION. Why do you think this is happening?

D: Part of it was that there was no actual creative thought put into this. It’s just your name with a goofy picture. That makes it unusual and quirky. It also speaks to an extremely small target market. I mean, how many people in this city know who you are? And yet, you got lots of calls. If you had something useful to sell, which you clearly don’t, you’d be making money right now.

S: That’s all true, but there’s more to this. Part of your ‘success’ has been that the boards have been up for about two months now. Long past their usefulness.

I’d agree if I was just getting calls from people I knew, but it feels like everybody knows my name now. There are thousands of people driving to work every morning who see this ridiculous billboard.

I agree that at first it was sort of quirky and fun, but now it’s just tired and stale. Any fool can get a reaction by overdoing reach and frequency. Now most people think the boards are stupid, and that I’m an idiot.

D: In that case, I would say I accomplished my objective.

S: Are you suggesting that advertisers should follow this ‘strategy’ of yours?

D: Partially. It’s amazing how powerful a response you can get when you have a very tightly focused target market – even when using a mass medium like outdoor – so I would encourage advertisers to push the envelope on that.

S: True enough. You can have huge impact if your secondary market watches you talk to your primary market. In this example, people who don’t know me watched you talk to people who do know me, and they felt compelled to get in on the act.

D: Right. People like to be in on a gag. If they see a gag happening they’re not part of, like a quirky billboard that makes no sense, they’re going to want to find out what is going on. And that is a beautiful thing, because you’ve created a demand for what you have. It’s too bad you don’t have anything to offer, otherwise we could do a reveal to this little tease.

S: Nice. Any other brilliant insights you want to share with all of the marketing talent in Canada?

D: There’s one thing I would change. I should have included your e-mail address so you’d get hate mail, too.

S: Yes, a call to action is fairly standard. I guess that’s just what happens when media people dive into the deep waters of creative strategy without their water wings.

D: #$%^&

Editor’s note: At this point, the interview becomes unprintable.

Mark Szabo is a suit at MacLaren McCann in Calgary. He is all too happy to give out his e-mail address: mark.szabo@maclaren.com.