Someone said “everything is funny unless it happens to you”. Laughter abounded yesterday as people learned more about the Boston Lite Brite Bomb incident. Some were laughing at Boston for over-reacting. Turns out the little electronic critters had been up for three weeks before someone notified the police. One theory is that the guerrilla marketing agency, Interference, actually made the call to the police to get the publicity sunami started. Anyway, the Boston police weren’t laughing and spent the day trying to figure out how much this should cost Cartoon Network and its agency. By the end of day, they made it clear that the price of indignity was a cool 750,000 smackers as noted in Promo Xtra:
Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Attorney General is investigating Turner, and Boston officials are seeking restitution for at least $750,000 for the fees that the city incurred responding to what it believed was a terrorist threat. Turner CEO Phil Kent is talking with city officials about the restitution, and other issues, Powell said.
Others were laughing at the agency for not notifying the police in advance. The comedy cascaded to the truly ridiculous with the press conference carried by Fox News featuring the arrested street team dudes talking about their hair!
And given all the hub bub, bidding was up to $1200 for one of the Lite Brite bombs on eBay. Who wouldn’t want one of these infamous little bad boys of guerrilla marketing?
ABC News ran a feature on this story on Nightline last night which you can watch on their website today. If you don’t get there today, the video is called “Nightline Online: Guerrilla Ads Gone Wrong.” You might recognize one of the “experts” being interviewed.
Lots of blogs added their two cents worth. Love David Morgan’s headline on his MediaPost blog, “Let’s Stop Being Dumb”. Here’s the intro to his piece which sums up part of the story quite nicely:
By now, most of you probably know that most of Boston was locked down yesterday in traffic jams and mass transit delays because of a guerilla marketing campaign gone bad.
Black boxes with electronics were placed in heavily trafficked public places in a number of large U.S. cities. These devices were there to project LED images on public walls, bridges, abutments and the like. The projection of these images in public places was intended, I suspect, to create lots of cool buzz among the public about a new media launch. At this point, it appears that permits were not obtained to place these devices in Boston, nor was the Boston police department notified of their existence.
This was really, really dumb.
So how does this end? Boston-haters certainly have another quiver in their bow. Cartoon Network will probably have to find a new guerrilla agency assuming Time-Warner even lets them use the word “guerrilla” ever again. Other big companies are going to be more cautious with their guerrilla activities. Interference will go silent for a bit and then re-emerge stronger than ever having executed the most infamous of guerrilla campaigns to-date. Those of us that think marketing at worst should “do no harm” and at best, make life a little better, are slightly emboldened, knowing that the alternative is really not a joke.