Stating the (apparently) Not-So-Obvious

This past week the Great Boston Panic of '07 morphed from guerilla marketing campaign into bomb scare into "terrorist hoax" into full-scale media-driven farce that ends today with Turner Broadcasting apologizing and agreeing to a $2 million fine in exchange for not being prosecuted. Bloggers, pundits, and columnists have been split in arguing that it was either wholly irresponsible of the advertisers to pull this "stunt", or that this is homeland security run amok and such overreaction is exactly the kind of fear "the terrorists" intended to instill in us.

What seems to be missing from the discussion is the fact that this was all a marketing campaign, designed to promote the show (and upcoming movie) Aqua Teen Hunger Force on Cartoon Network. The show is part of the [adult swim] block, which airs weeknights starting around 10 or 11. The show has a cult following, but does not draw remarkable numbers (even for Cartoon Network), but this act is about as good an advertising campaign as you can get. You can't pay for the amount of times their show has been mentioned over the past 4 or 5 days in the mainstream media. A 2 million dollar fine is pocket change for the Turner Broadcasting Co. and the return on the investment could be substantial if people seek out the show. The act is the kind of thing that will appeal to skeptical, cynical, dissenting young folks and academics, and that's just who the show tends to target.

Maybe, just maybe, this fallout was all part of the plan. In hindsight, it seems foolproof. Those little light boards they hung up in a dozen or so cities are relatively cheap, couldn't have cost them more than $20-30 a pop. Put 100 of them around the country and you've spent $2,000-3,000, which is about what you'd pay to advertise a couple times on TV, and you'd only reach a niche market. But, if by chance, the devices cause a panic, you can come out and explain it was all part of an ad campaign for our show AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE on Cartoon Network, Monday through Friday at 10:30pm (or whenever it airs) all of a sudden your 2,500 dollar investment has returned a HUGE audience for the advertising of your otherwise low-profile show. You get about as many eyeballs/ears finding out about your show as those who pay 100 times as much for 30 seconds of Super Bowl ad time.

The pure audacity of the act will draw more new viewers than any traditional televised advertising system ever could. Even with the $2 million fine, that amount of money would not have bought the amount of air time they have gotten. There are those who say they should have at least alerted the authorities, but, in this scenario, that would have completely defeated the point.

It's like the advertisers saw Borat and attempted to apply the concept to this campaign: Make people/an institution look foolish, but do it in such a way that it makes others who see it reflective. Too bad we live in a reflexive society.