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Photo of the Day, November 24, 2009: Hook, Line, and Sinker
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Do they have to keep picking on us? Wired published a story today about new wave advertising. The lead paragraph made mention of the January 31 boondoggle by the Boston Police
"These types of marketing tactics will not and should not be tolerated," vowed Boston Mayor Thomas Menino after the now-infamous blinking LED ads for the Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force were discovered on bridges and underpasses, leading to a bomb scare that shut down parts of the city.Immediately labeled a prank, and later described as guerilla marketing, the ad campaign for ATHF has gotten a lot more play than it would have if there wasn't an overreaction. Menino even joked at the St. Patrick's day breakfast yesterday that some mayors complain about deficits, he held up one of the ATHF "bombs," and explained that it was followed by the giant $2 million check he held up. The $2 million was meant as a repayment of funds spent in reacting to the bomb scare and a settlement to keep charges from being filed against the corporate sponsors of the advertising.
The wired piece didn't focus on the dont's of new advertising – it was more of an overview of how traditional TV commercials and print ads will need to be augmented by other methods, taking advantage of new technologies, to be effective to capture the evolving consumer. A couple of cell-phone based technologies are referenced before they break out the big guns. HSS, or Hypersonic sound, is being used in OfficeMax stores to transmit "tightly focused directional sound beams that can only be heard by those standing directly in their path, an effect that some compare to hearing voices in their heads." Great, we're ditching the fake bombs for voices in our heads. But the focus on Massachusetts isn't left with the lite-brite, the piece wraps up with allusion to the iRobot Roombas and Scoobas, a company based here in the Commonwealth.
If one thing is clear, it's that no one really knows exactly what advertising will look like in 50 or even 20 years. "Part of my job is to study this stuff," says Vedrashko, "but it sometimes creates as many questions as it answers." As if to prove his point, he starts wondering aloud what might happen to advertising when smart robots begin handling mundane household tasks. "When robots start cleaning our homes, it's not unrealistic to assume they'll also be purchasing cleaning products," he says.If your Roomba starts blinking or etching patterns of Mooninites in your floors beware, friends, beware.
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Uh, that's *guerilla* advertising, not gorilla.
damn spell check and my laziness. not a good combination late at night.
But the state is still prosecuting the guys who got hired to put these "really scary" signs up around town?
They've been happy to forgive the company that built all the signs. They never arrested (or identified) the person at Interference who ordered that they should be installed on bridges, or who decided not to put any contact info on them. They knew at 10 in the morning that these signs were harmless, but they never explained why they hid that fact for most of the day from the public and from their own cops and encouraged a panic instead. There was an unrelated fake pipe bomb that day AT A HOSPITAL, and they decided not to arrest or prosecute the guy who placed the fake bomb. They've ignored the massive failures of communication that created such chaos that day, guaranteeing that it will happen again. And now the mayor is making jokes about it all while still claiming that Berdovsky and Stevens should be locked up? They made $300 from those signs, while Menino made $2,000,000. Who's the criminal?
Berdovsky and Stevens now have a permanent felony arrest record that will screw up the rest of their lives, a night in jail, multiple court dates, travel restrictions, and tens of thousands of dollars of legal expenses. Menino has a souvenir he can joke about, and he still has the nerve to keep pressing bogus charges against those two scapegoats. In a real justice system, the Boston officials who decided to create the huge panic that day would be the ones facing prosecution.