Boston shuts down
Boston came to a grinding halt yesterday after a guerrilla marketing prank went wrong.
In a classic case of a publicists' nightmare, officials found electronic blinking signs throughout the city prompting the closing of a highway and the deployment of bomb squads.
The 38 1-foot high signs looked like a circuit board with protruding wires and batteries and featured a cartoon character giving passersby the finger. They were part of a promotion for the Cartoon Network TV show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries and a meatball.
The devices had been in place for two to three weeks in 10 cities. The marketing company that placed the signs, Interference Inc., was ordered to remove them immediately. From the ABC story: "...Messages seeking additional comment from the Atlanta-based Cartoon Network were left with several publicists. "
Guess that stunt just made itself to the pages of marketing textbooks of the future...I know what Jill Beasley would have to say!Update: 5:30pm Some of the signs are already on ebay - going for $US450+!
When being clean isn't a good thing
Democratic candidate Senator Joe Biden spent the day in the news yesterday. In the morning he launched his Presidential campaign. In a later interview he described fellow nominee Barack Obama as an African-American who is "clean and articulate".
Since then it's been all over the media with the commentators calling it a "racially insensitive" slur. Jay Leno joked last night on the Tonight Show that Biden has the record for the shortest Presidential campaign ever - 7 hours. Apparently it was all over.
What do you think? Hyped over-reaction?
One of the key tickets Obama is running on is that of ethics. Legislation that he introduced recently for debate is the Clean Up Act - aiming to increase the transparency in government and decreasing the influnce of lobbyists in the legislative process.
Trouble is Biden can't overly defend himself even if he was trying to imply that perhaps Obama was a cleaner politician than most...he'd be doing more to promote Obama's image than he already was!
Wanna be Biden's media advisor, or Obama's?!
UGM
Have you heard about user generated marketing - the new buzz in marketing (of course, it already has it's own acronym!). The most expensive real estate in TV adland is the Superbowl, and this Sunday the odds are that the hottest new commercials (there's always a buzz to see how good the creative executions are that the Madison Ave ad shops put forward at a airtime cost of close to US$2.5million for a 30-second spot) will have been created for very little cost by members of the public.
It's all part of the You Tube phenomenon - people becoming their own creative video producers, and viewers getting more and more accustomed to watching less than perfect production quality video. It's all about the creative - not the production.
Doritos, GM, and even the NFL itself, have all run campaigns encouraging consumers to send in submissions for potential commercials to be run during the event. Customers should know better than anyone how they want to see their brand represented, right?...Check out the links for some examples of how the promotions worked and the results.
For $2.5m they'd better work!
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