And radical marketers: stay away from Boston.

When the folks behind Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” hired New York guerilla marketing agency Interference, Inc. to promote the cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the results turned into a pathetic display of “the culture of fear” in Boston. The agency hired people in several large US cities to place signs around town that displayed two of the cartoons characters in a “Lite-Brite-esque” way. Given the sort of ingeniously off-beat marketing campaigns that take place around Manhattan, this was pretty tame stuff. However, when some Boston citizens first saw the lit signs near bridges and in other public locations, there first thought was: BOMBS. After the bomb squad grabbed a few in full bomb gear and found that they were far from dangerous, it became a “hoax.” (Now, pardon me, but doesn’t a hoax require that the person responsible actually make the claim that it was a bomb?)

The men who put the signs up in Boston were arrested, and the mayor has been on hand to make a fool of himself. Fortunately, the two arrested men (Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens–hired by Interference, Inc.) have laughed in the face of the ridiculous situation that they’re caught in. They gave a hillarious press conference, which MSNBC aired a long portion of. Have a look on YouTube.

There you have it. So marketers are more than just liars–they’re often terrorists. Fortunately, these terrorists are far more interested in the effect of ’70s hairstyles on modern culture than in starting a jihad.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Electronic Culture, Marketing. It has been viewed 1220 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!