Recently I was at a Halloween party. It was Halloween, coincidentally, and into my buddy’s basement-turned-dance-club walks Colonel Sanders with a bucket of chicken, offering it to everyone. At the time I remember thinking, “wow this guy is seriously costume committed.” The costume was spot on. It looked as if the Colonel himself had risen from the grave. So having started my third beer, I did what anyone else would have done and grabbed me a delicious piece of extra crunchy deep-fried yum-yum.

That moment, I smelled something besides the Colonel’s secret recipe. What I smelled was marketing in disguise. Here’s what made me suspicious:

KFC is hardly doing cool enough advertising right now that somebody would roll into a Halloween party dressed as such. The Colonel is certainly an icon, but most Halloween getups are based on what’s current i.e. Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, Michael Phelps and what have you. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that guy just really liked KFC and wanted to be the Colonel for Halloween. I guess I’ll never know.

What I want to believe is that KFC had this awesome guerilla idea and executed it to a tee. My buddy lives in a house with four other dudes. They sent out a massive event invite on Facebook and half of San Francisco attended this thing. How easy would it have been for KFC to go onto Facebook, find a bunch of big Halloween parties and send Colonel Sanders out to them to give away free chicken?

Later I mentioned the encounter to my buddy and asked him what he thought. Neither of us knew the guy, but we both agreed it was pretty cool that someone would come as Colonel Sanders handing out chicken.But if we had come to find out that KFC paid for the Colonel’s attendance that night, it would have been instant lame. Why? Because true guerilla marketing occurs when the target doesn’t know they’re being advertised to. It has to be sneaky. The advertiser’s cover can’t be blown.

You hear “guerilla” used all the time now to describe marketing tactics that are unconventional. And while unconventional is a big component of effective guerilla marketing, we need to remember to keep incognito because now more than ever no one wants to be caught by advertising.