Note to self--never check your inbox before going to bed.
It's just about midnight, and I've been besieged by email about the Cartoon Network's Boston debacle, where snarky digital billboards for its Adult Swim Aqua Teen Hunger Force show were mistaken as terrorist-planted explosive devices. Click here for more details if you need 'em.
So, the question every ping asked: "Great Surprise marketing, or what?"
My answer: Or what.
While I think everybody's kinda overreacting and should pop a Valium or three, the fact remains that this was Stupid, not Surprise.
Surprise marketing should delight, not incite. While indeed delivering Pow!, this dopey stunt did so with the force and subtlety of a kick in the nuts; the definition of Surprise to a sadist, perhaps. And while I'm certain it will drive puh-lenty word-of-mouth, the words driven may not be part of a marketer's dream vocabulary.
Look, I'm sure this was relatively well-intentioned (Christ, I sure hope it was), but severely backfired. In a jittery USA, nobody would be that dumb as to promote a cartoon show by scaring the crap out of a metropolis. There are better ways to Surprise than to jokingly cry "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
Somewhere in a cave, carved into a deserted mountain range, Osama Bin Laden is chuckling.
I'm going to sleep.
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UPDATE:
They'll only answer questions about their hair? Two arseholes. The less said about them, the better.