Did The "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" Viral Marketing Campaign Go Too Far?

I'm of the mind that not only did Boston over-react, but even more embarrassingly, the media has turned this into yet another pointless circus.



Yes, the lite-brite boards promoting the "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" movie -- placed in 10 cities around the country by guerilla marketers -- were suspicious at first glance. By all means, call in the authorities. But it shouldn't have taken long to realize this was a stupid marketing stunt. Now, with egg on their faces, Boston authorities are calling it a "terror hoax." Um, no.

As my colleague Lisa DeMoraes at the Washington Post wrote the other day, these viral marketing campaigns are pretty damn common:

Spooky guerrilla marketing campaigns for TV series are old hat for TRWCT. Why just the other day, they all got packages from ABC Family network containing vials of white powder. The mind reels, thinking how the mayor of Boston would have reacted to one of those. (ABC Family explained that the white powder was instant faux snow and that the reporters were supposed to add water and enjoy the winter wonderland that would erupt.)

And TRWCT are still chuckling about the night during the TV Press Tour when they all returned to their hotel rooms, turned on the lights and simultaneously broke the standing high-jump record upon discovering someone had broken into their rooms and scrawled the word "Redrum" in lipstick across their bathroom mirrors -- just like Jack Nicholson did in the movie set in that Estes Park, Colo., hotel not long before he tried to separate his wife's head from her shoulders with an ax.

It was just those pranksters at ABC marketing reminding them to be sure and review the upcoming remake of "The Shining."

And who can forget the time -- another press tour -- when TRWCT returned to their hotel rooms -- again, late at night -- to discover their bathrooms were cordoned off with police crime-scene tape. That one went over particularly well with The Women Who Cover Television.

More recently, in March '05, the merry marketing pranksters at NBC were sent out to write "Omnium finis imminet" -- loosely, "The end is near" -- on trash cans, buildings and sidewalks in cities nationwide. They took snaps of their work and posted those images on the Internet. Interestingly, that campaign did not cause the kind of panic we saw in Boston yesterday because, of course, no one in this country knows Latin.

Read her whole, witty as always, column for a good and dripping-with-sarcasm perspective on both how inane viral marketing is... and how even more inane Boston's reaction was.

As for me... you can see me mouthing off about the controversy on yesterday's edition of G4's "Attack of the Show." You can watch the video here.