Guerrilla marketing ethics?

The idea of marketing is to make your product or service well known. The marketing can be negative but it can command a lot of publicity. Is it worth it? I don't believe that the following advertisers had any intention of negativity. Surely the best thing would be to have a positive marketing campaign that reaches out to as many as the negative?

Take for instance, Sony Ericsson who wanted to get the public to try out some functions of the mobile phone. They got people to look like tourists who wanted their picture taken with the phone and attractive women who sat in bars to start a conversation about their purchase. Once the people found out that they were not genuine, the campaign became negative. The moral seems to be, if you are advertising, make sure you are upfront about it. Especially when you are, in effect, invading their space.

IBM decided to chalk symbols on the streets of San Francisco. Some technologically minded people liked it but others thought it as graffiti. Although the chalk was biodegradable, it took weeks for the stuff to be removed. The moral is to try and be in the good books of everyone.

Some offensive images can arouse suspicion. For instance, Cartoon Network decided to place these images. Some residents in Boston thought they were bombs. I remember the news showing the city grid-locked. The moral is to be aware of the past incidents that could have changed people's sentiments.

Smells and sounds are a relatively new medium to be exploited. They have been used to try and gain a bigger impact but the more unusual and unknown it is, the more people would be scared. Paramount Pictures teamed up with the Los Angeles Times to trigger the theme music of Mission Impossible whenever a newspaper was baught at a newspaper rack. People had thought it to be a bomb. Sending smells through an underground system to advertise a drink did not go down too well because it could be thought of as poisonous gas. Besides, forcing someone to smell something is not a good idea. The moral again is to consider the sentiments shaped by recent events. And don't force something upon the unsuspecting public.

Examples from BusinessWeek: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/02/0209_guerrilla/index_01.htm