by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Last Thursday evening around 7:30 at Guy and Ste-Catherine: motorcycle police cops are escorting a bunch of cars as pedestrians strain to see. The cops are real but the cars in the motorcade are just showroom models for sale, complete with ads in the window. A stringy-haired transvestite (I notice for once before it's too late) moans to her busty friend, "What a waste of taxpayers' money!" To which I butt in: "The car company surely paid for the police motorcade, but it's impressive eh?"

"Absolutely!" replied the transvestite in a ringing deadpan lisp.

My buddy Nigel (formerly known in this column as Baz) says he was a target of an even stealthier marketing gimmick. "I was in (a downtown record store) and an old guy sees me looking at CDs. He comes up and it's a folksy chitchat, a warm and fuzzy moment. He's recommending all sorts of CDs as a fellow shopper. Then half-an-hour later I see him walking into the employees' entrance. I felt like a sucker. There's a special place in hell for those people."

Nigel also reports that former local musician Dominique Meeroff, now a popular London busker, was paid 100 pounds by promoters of Hugh Grant's Love Actually to integrate two of the movie's songs into her sidewalk set.

So I buzzed Max Lenderman, a former journalist and musician who moved here via Chicago and New York to launch Gearwerx in Ville St-Laurent, a company that invents insane new ways to market to hip 16-to-24-year-olds. They've got 150 to 200 agents, average age about 20, who work 25 hours a week infiltrating the city with stealth ads. "We hire for personality, approachability, a smile, an aura - we want people interested in 10 different things, like the football quarterback who's also class VP who works on the yearbook."

Lenderman's the brains behind many of the stunts. "I can't unleash my sick and twisted mind all over the place. Our basic philosophy is, the simpler it is, usually the better."

Here's one: "Imagine a sweaty dancefloor. We have a really hot waitress walk through with a tray with a bucket of ice and a glass and a bottle of alcohol. She walks across the dancefloor with the spotlight on her, goes to the DJ booth, hands the DJ a drink, he takes a satisfied sip and cranks up the music three notches. That's a marketing message whether you like it or not."

Another: "Two people on a metro train talking about a fabulous, hot night. They'd be telling the story a little louder than usual, so everybody could pick up on it." Then they start raving about a product.

Another secret booze ad: "We were going to stage a marriage proposal in a really popular restaurant. The girl would accept and the happy guy would buy everybody a drink."

He's also held fashion shows on the metro during rush hour that involve "three hot girls with a guy carrying a small boombox playing ‘I'm Too Sexy.' They walked through the crowd, people were interested, it was fun."

Then there was a fake-spontaneous sidewalk auction for a spray that gets the smell of smoke out of hair. A spontaneous, real auction did actually take place previously, he says.

Isn't it dirty pool to advertise on the sly? "It's a big issue. Sometimes I don't sleep that well," says Lenderman. "From an integrity standpoint we really do try to go by one rule of thumb: if it's an intrusion and if there's no inherently visible benefit for the consumer on the spot, we won't do it."

Nobody has complained, according to an ad council rep I spoke with.

I started to wonder how far the stealth had gone. Chris Barry recommended a laser eye guy to me last week. Was he on the take? Pete McQueen gave me the number for a roofer. Could it be stealth? I pondered these questions over an Absolut vodka. Suddenly there was a flash in my mind: Absolut… "absolutely." I rushed back to Guy and Ste-Catherine to see if the transvestite who says "absolutely" was still there talking to people, marketing vodka. She had moved on.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca