Boston Shut Down by Viral Marketing

A marketing firm engaged by Turner Broadcasting's otherwise-awesome "Adult Swim" tv programs set up a bunch of kooky, semi-obscene Lite-Brite displays throughout 10 American cities. It was a guerilla WOM campaign for the cable program's "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" cartoon. Here in Boston, the locals went ape. "IT'S A BOMB! SHUT DOWN THE CITY!" Certainly a firememe was ignited online, and many marketing/advertising books are on the case. (I've also used this li'l kerfluffle to try out the new Technorati "WTF" function.)

I am not going to comment on whether or not this campaign was a good idea. It depends on whether you think "any press is good press" and personally my opinion on that age-old question tends to change with the winds. I am also not going to bother opining about the fact that the residents of Boston (cradle of American democracy! home of the original Minutemen!) reacted much more frenziedly than the citizens of the 9 other "target" cities. What's interesting to me is the reaction of our young staffers, here in our HQ office.

These are children of 9/11. Many of them were in high school when the Towers fell. The first years of their young adulthood were color-coded by the Homeland Security Alert system. Has this made them more sensitive to whiffs of terror? Has it made them less tolerant of poorly-designed marketing stunts that could be misconstrued, as happened here in Beantown?

Based on my anecdotal review of the email threads, most of these staffers tend to feel that the hoopla has been overblown --- both by Boston officials and by the media. Terror threats? Fact of life. Move on.

That's not to say that anyone thought that the original campaign was brilliant. Typical internal email:

"At first I thought this was a dumb hoax and a bad idea, that strapping any kind of device to a bridge was dumb. The more I hear the outrage though [the lead story on the Today Show? Really?], the more I feel like people are overreacting. This is what happens when you don't have a runaway bride story to chase down."

(This led to a quick debate about "whether or not the Thundercats would have let something like this go down," but that's another story.)

The Boston Globe (sub req'd) perceived a similar Generation Gap, in their coverage of the aftermath:

"The episode exposed a wide generational gulf between government officials who reacted as if the ads might be bombs and 20-somethings raised on hip ads for Snapple, Apple, and Google who instantly recognized the images for what they were: a viral marketing campaign."

Interesting, eh? The world of "CONTENT" has been micro-niched: most of us only see what we want to see, on TV, on the Web, on the iPod. Guerilla marketing like this represents one of the few remaining frontiers where marketers must be aware that their efforts will be received very differently by the many different types of people who walk the streets. Or drive the bridges.

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