Okay, I hate the term “Guerrilla Marketing” because it evokes images of some severely hateful and dangerous people. I envision businessfolk in suits carrying giant foam-core charts and AK-47s. Advertising should be thought-provoking and disruptive, but not deadly.

I’ve enacted some interesting advertising ideas in my time. Before the opening of a technology store, I and my colleagues covered the windows with paper, and tore holes to reveal a little more of the interior each day. One of us put on a giant furry alien costume and walked around the local marketplace with a battery-powered ticker in his three-fingered hands, reading lines like “Play more video games.” We also crashed a trade show and set up in a vacant booth. Nobody ever stopped us.

But I digress. Boston is also known for the infamous “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” Mooninite tech-forms that shut down the city for a day. THAT is the pinnacle of (let’s call it) ‘unconventional marketing’; Shutting down a city. Steve Jobs, eat your heart out (Steve did get to shut down part of Boston by opening the Apple store on Boylston, but I digress again).

Recently, on the subway train, I saw one of the panel ads, usually for stuff like banks and schools and beverages, and for the MBTA’s own communications. But this one was simply a sketch, a name, and a list of stuff the author does, like airbrushing shirts and handbags, and the web address. The guy (or gal) had taken one of the paid-for panel ads and flipped it over, drew on it, and put it back wrongside-out. It is possible the perpetrator took the panel home and brought it back, and maybe did this with several others.

Genius.

Illegal, yes, but deadly? No. Shut down the city? No. A better pitch than whatever was on the front side? Probably. I have nothing against blanketing a station with one company’s ads, as Dewar’s and Apple often do. I see nothing wrong with wrapping a bus in a movie ad. But let’s face it, they are not actually unconventional because there is an entire industry of moneymakers involved in those techniques. The difference here is that it cost nothing. It is basically graffiti, done tastefully and in a surprising way. I like it.

Only one problem: the website listed was at www.myspace.com/somethingtoolongtoremember… and I cannot remember it. A simpler name, and the creative would become sublime.