With the explosion of wireless, there’s also been an explosion of patents awarded for software. Patents that are heavily used -- and paid for -- by internet companies like Google. So there’s nothing better for their business than to weaken patent law. 

Which is exactly what they’ve been lobbying Congress about for over two years, using abusive legal firms who buy patents and then sue for damages the their argument for rewriting legislation. Using these “patent trolls” as a scapegoat is disingenuous, so Qualcomm -- whose business model is based on licensing patents -- needed to call a spade a spade.

We decided to use their own weapons against them, with the dubious url googlethetroll.com that exposed the real agenda behind all the propaganda. This subversive approach stacked the search results for "patent troll," collating the many articles and blogs that explained the real facts, lending a balanced perspective to all of Google's alarmist rhetoric.

Paired with this guerrilla tactic was a pro-patent campaign featuring actual inventors, who would be the real casualties of the proposed patent law change. This included a website that presented the stories of many inventors, along with their clear position of the need for keeping strong patent laws.

Seeing themselves as champions of inventors -- and a leading proponent of an innovation economy -- Qualcomm had us expand our work into a corporate campaign called “Garage Brands” that will eventually include a website, a traveling exhibition and a coffee table book.