AnnArbor.com Chalks Up Mixed Reviews for Its Sidewalk Ads

By: Mark Fitzgerald AnnArbor.com, the digital news organization that replaced the Ann Arbor News last week, announced its launch with billboards, radio and print ads around the Michigan city.

But one marketing effort spurred some controversy. The Newhouse Newspaper start-up used spray chalk on sidewalks throughout the downtown area with stencil-like designs that announced, "AnnArbor.com is here."

The large images were decried by some residents, commenting both at AnnArbor.com and on other Ann Arbor-oriented Web sites, as graffiti. "As far as I'm concerned it's vandalism," Elyse Rubin commented Thursday on the Web site of the Ann Arbor Chronicle.

AnnArbor.com President and CEO Matt Kraner told E&P the marketing effort for the organization, which publishes a print version twice weekly, "went fine."

"It was on the sidewalk for a couple of weeks," he said in a telephone interview Friday. "It was supposed to wear off, but it lasted a little longer than it was supposed to. ... Being good corporate citizens we were more than accomodating [to the city]."

The chalk was power-sprayed away in the last few days.

Kraner said the sidewalk chalking was a common advertising method in Ann Arbor, and that AnnArbor.com has talked with city officials about doing a new campaign using chalk in the fall when it introduces some upgrades to its site.

According to an account in AnnArbor.com by staff writer Edward Vielmetti, the city criminal code explicitly exempts chalk from the definition of prohibited graffiti. He noted that the on the University of Michigan campus inside the city, chalk messages for organizations are ubiquitous. But the campus bars spray-painted chalk, which was an objection to the AnnArbor.com campaign in some quarters.

And others did not like the idea of using public sidewalks for commercial messages. Jeff Herron, who publishes the free-distribution Outdoor Athlete Magazine that circulates in Ann Arbor, complained on the Ann Arbor Chronicle Web site that the marketing confuses the distinction betweeen journalist and marketer.

"Part of my distaste comes from this: guerilla marketing depends on manipulating the media," he wrote. "In the Web 2.0 world the readers are a key part of the media. To the extent this campaign is designed to generate a response from us, it's a bad idea.

"Newspapers converting from print to digital insist that they're journalists first -- that the delivery medium doesn't matter, only the content does," he continued. "Perhaps. But readers evaluate content based on the publisher's credibility. I don't think [AnnArbor.com] helps itself establish credibility by manipulating its readers or offending them by taking over the sidewalks."