Quotes of the Day

Go to a beach party in Spain or tune into Belgian radio, and you're likely to hear one word: "Chihuahua!" This is not a forlorn pet owner summoning his tiny, unimaginatively named dog. It is the sound of marketing, the remix of an old mambo song that has gone from TV spot to hit single and the word on millions of lips. And it's all brought to you by Coca-Cola — not that you'd know from listening to the song.

In a cluttered marketplace, advertisers need to be different. Traditional ads repeating a brand name 30 times in 30 seconds no longer stand out. So European advertisers are turning to stealth crossover techniques — creating radio and TV shows, and teaching the world to sing songs like Chihuahua — that invade culture in fresh ways. "Every marketer's dream is to transcend marketing and become a cultural phenomenon," says Nastia Orkina, a European marketing manager for Coke. "That's when you're connecting with consumers."

The Chihuahua craze began in spring 2002. Coca-Cola's marketing team in Spain and ad agency McCann-Erickson cooked up a spot featuring a subway car of commuters who, with a sip of Coke, are possessed by an irrepressible beat. The soundtrack is Chihuahua, a 1950s song remixed for the spot by Swiss musician DJ Bobo. Soon after the ad hit the air, and to the Coke team's surprise, "people were on talk shows saying, 'What does this mean?'," Orkina says. Coca-Cola moved fast to capitalize on the buzz. Teaming with record label BMG, which had found DJ Bobo, it slapped a Coke logo on CDs and started selling singles. The campaign spread to other markets. And Chihuahua mamboed to No. 2 on the pan-European Eurochart.

The stealth marketing success of 2003 in the Netherlands, a TV show called 6Pack, is funded by Heineken, but you won't see its logo during the show. 6Pack, which ended its 100-episode run last week, gave six young people 15 minutes each weeknight to amuse themselves on TV. They tried to glue themselves to the ceiling, learned how to spit fire, crashed a music-awards show — and won a nightly following of more than 75,000, all for "just six people with a couple of digital-video cameras," says producer Wouter Rengelink. Heineken provided the stars' salaries and 16 crates of beer — "R and D investment," says a spokeswoman — but had no editorial control and only a credit at the end of each episode.

An entire low-budget series can be created for $500,000, less than it can cost to produce a top-quality TV ad. This is something Heinz realized when it made Dinner Doctors on Britain's Channel 5. The campaign built around the cooking show, including a website and supermarket promotions, cost about $3 million and "was a better way to optimize our spend than traditional advertising," says Heinz spokesman Michael Mullen. In line with Britain's strict advertising rules, Heinz had no input or product placement, but was named as the show's sponsor. "This is about creating a high level of quality. The only risk would be if the consumer felt he's being fed a commercial," says Anna Prosser of Spring London, the agency that worked with Heinz on the Dinner Doctors campaign.

But advertisers may be misjudging audiences. "This kind of manipulation simply fuels the consumer revolt," says David Boyle, author of the new book Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life, who notes growing interest in "services, products and discourse that are unspun, unmanipulated, unpackaged." Not in the ad business. Mark Boyd, head of a new content division at ad agency BBH, says the content-programming hype is huge, though most agencies and their clients haven't figured out what, if anything, to do. He's betting on radio. "We take this out of the radio station. We raise production values. We bring in big-name people," Boyd says, to attract listeners with something different — and better — than what they're used to.

That was the secret to Chihuahua's success. If branding is about playing with consumers' minds, then play a game they'll like. Coca-Cola's goal was "to bring a fun moment to life," says Orkina. "Happy and joyful." As any marketer would be, if every campaign grew up to be a Chihuahua.

• JEFF CHU | London
• Marketers are using pop songs and logo-light TV shows to build their brands