Urban Spam Shuts Down City, Marketers Arrested

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February 1, 2007

There’s been a lot of hoo-ha over the last 24 hours over the fact that a guerrilla marketing campaign for TV Show TV Hunger Force where an LED icon was thrown over a wire and caused a power-cut. The bomb squad were also called.

Now, there are two camps here: the oh look how the police over reacted camp (led by Boing Boing) and the maybe they pushed it too far camp (led by Floyd Hayes). Boing Boing don’t seem to do much for a living) seem content to ridicule the Boston police:

Ashamed of their own foolish overreaction to finding some battery powered Lite Brites and promptly declaring a code red emergency that shut down Boston, authorities are hoping to save face by arresting Peter Berdovsky, who is charged with installing the innocuous signs.

Now, let’s remember. The police reacted to a sign of an angry icon with its middle finger in the air and some black box nestled under its feet. And one of them turned a whole load of power off. Should the police just have ignored it?

We’re not too sure what the Boing Boing team do to claim they’re experts on all this, but we think it would be better to listen to Floyd Hayes, who is a professional guerrilla marketer. He says:

Don’t get me wrong, ruffling the feathers of the establishment is never a bad thing, it’s how we move forward as a culture. Playing it safe leads to a situation where there is no movement or discussion thus leading to creativity being stifled. Art and good advertising should cause a deep intake of breath and create debate – I’m thinking of the old Beneton ads here – but perhaps this project for Cartoon Networks’ Hunger Force may have over stepped the mark.

From what I gather, a LED covered circuit board was thrown over a phone wire in Boston. The board featured a Moominte character from the Hunger Force show. It was electronic and glowing, the local authorities basically freaked out resulting in the bomb squad arriving to “detonate” the device, subways being closed and traffic being diverted. A major arse-pain for all concerned.

Now, you can’t blame the police here – they were doing what they thought was right – and for all they knew it was a dangerous device. They were reacting to a call from a member of the public who presumably was not aware of the subtleties of non-traditional marketing.