Guerrilla marketing—a case study of the launch of Ottawa Business News, OBN
Guerrilla marketing, GM, is in danger of becoming a lost art replaced by social media advertising and influencer promos. Still, you never know when something old might become new again, so I decided to retell the story of how we launched a local newspaper back in the mid 1980s using GM to promote it and establish its presence in what was then a very competitive media environment[1].
The story goes like this…
Guerrilla marketing—the Ottawa Business News story
When OBN (now OBJ, Ottawa Business Journal) was started in the mid-1980s, we wanted to break into the newspaper market which was then totally dominated by one newspaper, the Ottawa Citizen. Advertising rates reflected that newspaper’s dominant position and we thought that OBN could provide a useful B2B advertising vehicle plus it would be a way to bring a maturing Ottawa[2] business community (in what was then a town heavily dominated by civil servants—federal, provincial and municipal) together.
To publicize the paper, we wanted to drop newspaper boxes on every street corner downtown. These are amazing devices—they just sit there and advertise your product 24/7/365 and they don’t cost very much.
We then asked ourselves the question, “Do you ask for permission first?”
You may know this quote, “Entrepreneurs would rather ask for forgiveness than beg for permission.”
That in a nutshell was our young group at Terrace Investments Limited, the parent company of OBN and a number of other initiatives the best known of which is the NHL’s Ottawa Senators and the Canadian Tire Centre (originally called the Palladium). Do you think we asked anyone for permission to apply to the National Hockey League in 1989 for an expansion franchise? Again, nope.
If we had asked for permission to drop newspaper boxes on city sidewalks, what would Ottawa have done?
They would have convened a study group, that’s what.
They would have hired a consultant too.
The Study Group would have been made up of representatives of established media (eg, the Citizen folks, the Globe and Mail, existing billboard companies, etc), regular citizens, consultants, lawyers, urban planners and other bureaucrats. And guess what? They would likely have decided (after years of study and delay, not to mention untold consulting fees paid) that it was not in their best interests to allow paper boxes since it could provide a leg up for startups and erstwhile competitors like OBN. And they would have had the perfect political cover for their decision—newspaper boxes, which did not exist on City of Ottawa streets at that time, would represent “visual pollution” and “pedestrian danger…”
So, what we did instead was send around a young fellow in a masked costume (thanks, Duncan MacDonald) to put quarters in expired parking meters to save folks from dreaded Green Hornets and their parking tickets. After we did this, Ottawa City Council passed a bylaw making it illegal to put coins in a parking meter that was not “your own.” They were afraid that their parking ticket revenues would decrease if this somehow became a Good Samaritan citizen habit. So now, in Ottawa, you are only allowed to put money in your own meter. Go figure.
I believe that this was the first time anyone had tried this particular PR stunt and it got OBN’s mascot (Duncan) a lot of positive media coverage. This was political cover for our next move—we just dropped a couple of hundred paper boxes all over Ottawa, focused mainly on downtown but also certain crucial suburban business nodes.
Of course, the reaction was to get us a cease-and-desist letter from the city’s bylaw enforcement office (aka ordinance police) but we then made two effective counterarguments—1) this was a freedom of the press issue protected under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms and 2) the city should license paper boxes (we suggested $25 per year per paper box but the actual levy it turned out later was $75). Rather than ban them, the city could make money from them by “regulating” them.
This is quite persuasive because politicians love power, and they know that power comes from money. In fact, let’s add that to this equation P = M = B = $. What it means is that we have an equivalency between big politics, big media, big business and big money. It’s an equation that my wife, Dawn MacMillan, told me about in the early days of our relationship.
The end result was that a ton of newspaper boxes were deployed in Ottawa by all major and many minor publications, providing greater levels of convenience for readers (this was in the days before the public internet ate everyone’s lunch, err industries).
Larger competitors like the Ottawa Citizen and the Globe and Mail didn’t deploy a puny 200 paper boxes like Ottawa Business News did—they reacted by putting out thousands of the things which meant that OBN had forced them to expend more of their resources on distribution and less on content. This is called strategic misdirection and entrepreneurs use it all the time to even up the playing field by basically substituting brains for money, which is, of course, exactly what GM is.
To this day, neither newspaper can match the renamed Ottawa Business Journal in terms of local business coverage or integration into the local business community. One tries and fails; the other doesn’t try at all.
I found an old article from the Ottawa Citizen dated April 15th, 1986, talking about the launch of OBN; you can see a copy below at the end of this story. I asked my ChatGPT AI (I call him P3ter[3]) to read this article and summarize it; here (with a few edits by me) is our version…
The Forgotten Newspaper That Helped Shape Ottawa’s Business Media
Rediscovering the 1986 launch of Ottawa Business News — and how it sparked a legacy
Every once in a while, you stumble across a piece of your past that makes you stop and smile. That happened to me this week when I unearthed a long-lost Ottawa Citizen article from April 15th, 1986 — a story announcing the launch of a new publication I created nearly 40 years ago: Ottawa Business News.
Seeing it again felt a bit like finding an old photograph of yourself with a very ambitious haircut. Equal parts nostalgia and pride.
Back in the mid-80s, Ottawa’s business community was growing up fast. Hi-tech was emerging, entrepreneurship was becoming part of our regional identity, and the city needed something more than the occasional business section buried between world news and classified ads. We needed a dedicated voice — upbeat, insightful, and focused on the local economy.
A “Positive Alternative” to the Old Guard
The Ottawa Citizen described Ottawa Business News as offering a “positive choice to local business interests.”
That wasn’t marketing spin. It was the mission.
At the time, too much business reporting was gloomy or adversarial. Meanwhile, hundreds of companies were building innovative products, hiring people, and expanding across the National Capital Region — and no one was telling their stories.
We set out to change that.
Glenn Lisle, then a 33-year-old CFRA reporter, became our first managing editor. A full-time team plus 22 contributors joined him. We printed the paper in Smiths Falls, set up shop in the old Mallorn Centre, and distributed the first 12,000 copies free of charge across Ottawa.
By issue two, the cover price was 50 cents. (A price point which today wouldn’t even buy you paperclips.)
35,000 copies by year-end, reaching 20,000 businesses and 8,000 government offices across the region.
But those were exciting times.
Filling a Gap the Market Didn’t Know It Needed Filled
When the Citizen asked why Ottawa needed another publication, I said something that still rings true today, “If there’s anything this community needs, it’s a positive perspective.”
We weren’t trying to compete with big dailies. We were carving out a space between small weeklies and major papers — a place where local entrepreneurship, technology, real estate, and economic development could find a voice.
We aimed to be as credible as The New York Times, The Financial Post, or USA Today — lofty comparisons, but we were serious.
For a brief but influential period, Ottawa Business News gave the city something it had never had before: a homegrown, optimistic, business-focused publication featuring local success stories.
A Legacy That Survived Long After
Ottawa Business News’ spirit has lasted a long time. By the mid-90s, Ottawa’s economy had transformed again, and a renamed publication arrived on the scene: Ottawa Business Journal (OBJ).
OBJ carried forward the same core idea: Ottawa deserves its own business voice. A publication that celebrates entrepreneurs. Tracks commercial real estate. Spotlights innovation. Tells the story of our economic evolution.
Looking back now, I’m proud that Ottawa Business News helped blaze an early trail.
Even if history has largely forgotten, its DNA is still out there — in the way Ottawa covers business today.
Because the past has a funny way of reminding us of who we are.
Finding that Citizen article reminded me that:
the entrepreneurial itch goes back decades,
media innovation has always been part of my journey, and
even modest ventures can leave a meaningful mark.
What began as a simple idea in 1986 — tell Ottawa’s business story — has echoed forward through the years in many ways. And who knows? Maybe it’s time to tell a few more.
Bruce M Firestone, PhD, and P3ter, AI
Real Estate Investment and Business coach
ROYAL LePAGE Performance Realty broker
• MAKING IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE
[1] Note that OBN is still around although it is now known by its successful descendent, Ottawa Business Journal, OBJ, https://obj.ca/.
[2] Canada’s capital city.
[3] This is a leet spelling where a number is substituted for one or more letters—it’s a coder thing to distinguish between when you are talking to a human and when you are conversing with an AI.
