by Julie Bort
It’s possible that Marc Benioff is the craziest celebrity CEO in the tech industry.
The 6-foot-5, 290-pound co-founder of Salesforce.com has “the mind of a fox and the body of a bear,” writes David A. Kaplan in Forbes.
That fox-like mind is famous for coming up with stunts that journalists can’t resist writing about.
Benioff spoke in San Francisco today as part of a multi-city roadshow the company calls Cloudforce. He is hyping up Salesforce.com’s new “social enterprise” image.
Yet Benioff is infamous for turning others’ events into stunts that brings the spotlight back on him and his company. There’s a term for it: guerrilla marketing.
He’s so good at it that even when others (like Microsoft) tried the same tactics on Salesforce, he still lands on top.
Here’s a look back at some of his all-time greatest stunts…
He hired fake protesters to disrupt a Siebel conference — and drew the cops in.
Shortly after Salesforce.com was launched, Benioff hired actors to pretend to be “protesters” at a giant conference for his biggest rival at the time Siebel Systems. (Oracle bought Siebel in 2005.)
The mock protesters picketed the Moscone Center with signs chanting, “The Internet is really neat … Software is obsolete!” Benioff even went so far as to hire a fake TV crew to cover the “protest.”
He had also considered hiring an armored tank to enter the scene, driven by someone dressed like General Patton but then decided that “such a stunt might be too outlandish,” he says in the book Behind the Cloud.
Siebel called the police and a big news story was born.
From this stunt the Ghostbusters-inspired “No software” logo was born.
Read complete story on businessinsider.