Guerrilla Marketing Gets Aggressive

No sooner had twenty-somethings Andrew Moore and Chad Draizen walked up to the bar at Kingdom (Biscayne & Northwest 67th) when they were approached by two attractive young women, who engaged them immediately and enthusiastically in conversation. Moore and Draizen were amazed - had they become, suddenly and without knowing it, chick magnets?

The answer was not long in coming: "Hey, you guys want to try Hype?" asked the more talkative of the women - a short bleach-blond with a pink halter top and a giant butterfly tattoo fluttering across the top of her butt - "It's a new energy drink."

The girl's name was Shay, she said, and it was her mission - her job, you might almost say - to convince Moore and Draizen to try the drink, a fizzy, sweet concoction, as pink as Shay's scant shirt. Unfortunately for Shay, Moore and Draizen just weren't the energy drink types.

"She was pretty aggressive," Draizen recalls. "I didn't want to drink the thing -- she was like, 'Okay, I'll order it anyway!'"

When Draizen refused a second time, things got downright hairy. "She asked me why I was so dull and conservative," he says. "and I didn't have any answer for her. . . She tried to put us on the spot a number of times - she was trying to figure out why we were there. She was like, 'You're spring breakers, right? You must be spring breakers.'"

Eventually, Shay gave up and told the young men that she had to get home, to West Palm Beach. But ten minutes later, she was still outside the bar, chatting up another table of men. She was showing them her butterfly.

"I guess they saw some people that were easier targets outside," Draizen reflects. --

href="mailto:isaiah.thompson@miaminewtimes.com"undefined>Isaiah Thompson