At the risk of losing anything resembling respectability, I have a confession to make. I am a 39-year-old fan of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and I've been a fan almost since the show premiered. Hell, I own the first season DVD. ATHF is a masterpiece of silliness. It's surreal, sometimes gross, and often juvenile, and I make it a point to watch ATHF every chance I get.
So, if yesterday's events in Boston screw up my chance to see new episodes or the movie version of this thoroughly quirky cartoon that I thoroughly enjoy, I will be thoroughly pissed.
I might even, like, stamp my foot or something.
In case you have been hiding under a rock, here's the skinny on what happened in Boston...
It was guerrilla marketing at its worst. Turner Broadcasting's Atlanta agency, hired to promote the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, farmed out the ad campaign to New York-based Interference, Inc. Interference Inc hired people in Boston and several other major cities to install lighted images of a character seen in many ATHF episodes, the "mooninite," Ignignokt.
The images were circuit boards with obvious wires and batteries attached. Someone saw one of these things near downtown Boston, and before you could say "dancing is forbidden" (I should give a prize to the first person who understands that reference), the bomb squad was coming in and blowing up bird-flipping mooninites all over Beantown.
The cable news channels went bonkers (leading to some pretty hilarious and clueless commentary on occasion -- one Fox News talking head's take on the little mooninite flipping everyone off was priceless, hope to find it on YouTube one day), and roads and rail lines all over Boston pretty much shut down for the better part of the day.
Bloggers figured this deal out before anyone else did, but you know, we're just a bunch of random lunatics -- nobody, least of all Boston PD, would listen to a blogger.
Eventually, two art-school dropouts were arrested for the crimes -- Sean Stevens, age 28, and Peter Berdovsky, 27 (I don't know if they are dropouts, but that's kind of fun to write).
These jackasses smirked all the way into and out of jail, giving a presser today after being released on bail that was very much in the spirit of Ignignokt and his middle finger. Reflecting that tired old pose a lot of self-styled "alternative" people have towards the media, the guys rambled on about hairstyles and Berdovsky's dreds, and most amazing of all, their lawyers let them. Way to go, guys. I know how clueless the msm can be sometimes, but -- well, this isn't as funny as it seems.
Berdovsky and Stevens were hired by Interference Inc to do the dirty deeds, and though the guys were charged with a felony -- placing a hoax device -- and disorderly conduct, they really didn't seem too worried.
Thus far, only Turner Broadcasting seems to have handled this event properly. They issued a statement that did the grown-up thing -- they took responsibility. One version of the statement aired last night between programs on Adult Swim, the block of adult-oriented toons that airs late at night on the Cartoon Network.
Still, the City of Boston is probably gonna sue, sue, sue.
I can accept that Turner is being the big kahuna here and shouldering the burden. It makes me respect the company, actually.
But I felt compelled to write something about the public relations nightmare that followed the public relations nightmare.
There was the press conference earlier today with Sean Stevens and Peter Berdovsky going on like a couple of high-school age stoners who just didn't get it, but before that, there was the sudden disappearance of www.interferenceinc.com from the Web.
In crime blogging I've encountered this phenomenon a lot -- particularly when someone is suspected of having committed a crime. If free, the suspect will move quickly to try and eliminate anything they can think of that they've put on the Internet in the past. I know no one will ever listen to me, but every time I think -- do you know how suspicious that looks? I made a promise to myself a long time ago that if (God forbid) I was ever suspected of anything, I would not touch any of my online presence. That sort of thing just screams that you might have something to hide.
Of course, it could be that Interference Inc's host servers were just slammed by a new influx of traffic, but I kind of doubt it. Someone at the funky, bold badass stealth marketing company chickened out and took their stuff offline, post-haste. I'm providing you links via the Internet Wayback Machine.
Some people think Boston PD overreacted to this situation. This is based on the pretty logical argument that the mooninite images were all over a number of major cities, including New York and Atlanta, and no one here or in NYC freaked out and called the bomb squad.
I think there's a reason Interference Inc took its site offline, though.
I've had a problem with the whole guerrilla marketing concept ever since I first heard of it. This is how Interference Inc described it when the Wayback Machine cached their site in 2004:
Examples of Guerrilla and Alternative Marketing:In the last statement I added italics because it seems to me Interference Inc screwed up those two things via Sean Stevens and Peter Berdovsky.
Feet on the Street
Product Sampling
Publicity Stunts
Street Theater
Branded Hitchhikers
Poster Boards on Lampposts
Costumed Characters Interacting With The Public
Flyer Distribution and Posting
Stickering
Street Stenciling
Branded Free Shuttle Buses
Random Acts of Kindness
Guerrilla Marketing is delivering a relevant message to a desired individual, at an appropriate location, in a time when they are most receptive to it by any means necessary.
And you know -- I'm just kind of tired of the whole sneaky-ass gestalt involved in schemes like guerrilla marketing, anyway. Especially when it's done for a large corporate entity. If you're an independent person online, one man or woman offering something, a little slack could be cut if you try and steer some people towards your site. A lot of people don't want to pay for even a month's worth of text ads. So if they know how to work MySpace bulletins, blog comments and message boards appropriately, more power to them. That said, "blog spammers" -- people who make comments just so they can leave a weblog URL -- get routinely eviscerated at social news aggregation sites like Digg.com. Still, when I began crime blogging, I'm pretty sure I indulged in some unwitting guerrilla marketing to get people to come to the blog.
You know what all the stuff described above by Interference amounts to? Real-world spam.
Don't believe me?
If you run any kind of weblog, you eventually deal with "comment spam." Here's an example I just deleted from my personal weblog at HuffsBlog.com:
Superb! (I wrote something else and then I read below that I aint supposed ter. So I deleted it.)At first glance I might have thought that was a normal comment, just rather vague and pointless. But of course, the screen name left by the spambot was a dead giveaway: "porn oral." Another comment stated, "Like what you have to say. Your blog makes good since [sic] to me," and that came from "liposuction south jersey."
Guerrilla marketing depends on contrasts of subtlety and theatricality. Slapping stickers on other advertisements, hanging lighted mooninite signs in out of the way places -- kind of subtle. The marketer is attempting to "resonate" with the audience, attempting to insert a visual or verbal meme into the viewer's subconscious.
The reverse, of course, is the theatricality -- costume characters approaching people on the street, "street theater" -- the stuff that makes people turn their heads and go, "what the hell?" Stuff that could make everyday people feel harassed, if you think about it.
Both are, if you think about it, the advertiser attempting to get something for nothing. They are so concerned about this overseas that the British are enacting legislation against guerrilla marketing in time for the 2012 London Olympics:
Unveiling the marketing strategy at the government-sponsored 2012 Business Summit, the LOCOG deputy chairman Sir Keith Mills promised businesses that their investment would be protected by the toughest ever anti-guerrilla marketing legislation included in the Olympics Bill. "They will have the comfort to reap the full benefits without being undermined by unauthorised companies," Sir Keith said...This article written in 2005 for the Irish Examiner about an instance of guerrilla marketing at a major soccer match contains at least one quote that don't mince words at all:
Guerrilla marketing, ambush marketing, piggy-backing on other sponsors like leeches is disgraceful behaviour...The article was about a call to the Irish Government to introduce legislation against this sort of thing.
Over here, we've been snickering at this sort of thing, and to some degree, we admire it. Like I said, I still have some admiration for independent people who do this kind of thing online, with some cleverness. But maybe the lesson here is this: it's time to let the sneaky bastards in the advertising world know we're on to some of the more immature b.s. they try and pull. Most major cities have permits to be acquired, processes to follow for this sort of thing -- and I doubt the placement of the ads would have changed a bit. But I get the feeling that following a few rules is not in the true spirit of guerrilla marketing.
I'm still an Adult Swim fan, an Aqua Teen Hunger Force fan, and an admirer of anything clever, out-of-the-box, and original. But Sean Stevens and Peter Berdovsky smirking at the press conference and Interference Inc yanking its site off-line to me are examples of adolescent behaviors that have become ingrained and accepted in our culture. These are things that make me laugh like an idiot when I'm watching ATHF, but someone needs to call bullshit on this sort of immaturity when it worms its way off the screen and into real life. Ignignokt's middle finger was a ridiculous, embarrassing, and for the City of Boston, tense episode. Frankly, since two of the planes that crashed on 9/11/01 flew out of Logan Airport, I don't blame Boston PD as much as some others seem to.
Fine if Turner accepts the responsibility -- seems like the response of a mature, well-established company. But don't let the idiot kids behind the overall concept off the hook, either. Maybe the English and the Irish have something to teach us, here.
As an ATHF fan, let me just say this -- don't blame Frylock, Meatwad, or Master Shake, either -- even though what Shake says is often "very baffling."
Carl, though -- yeah, you could blame Carl, and I wouldn't care.
NOTE: This link is among the most interesting I've found about this case so far, and underscores what I've said above:
"As Boston Reeled, Was Artist Asked to Keep Quiet?"
|