A Few Thoughts About Boston’s Lite Brite Scare
OK. First, anytime a stupid marketing campaign – this one for a dumb cartoon none-the-less - disrupts a major city there is a certain humorous quality to it. Maybe the people involved don’t see it that way. They probably shouldn’t. But let’s face it, from a detached view it is funny. Still, that doesn’t mean the police didn’t do the right thing, or that the marketing company and TBS shouldn’t be taken out back and flogged for general stupidity until they write a check with a lot of zeroes on it. Most practical jokes fall into this gray area of humor.

INTENT
As for practical jokes, no one has suggested the company intended these light boards to appear to be dangerous. It just looked that way to law enforcement agents at the time. The real intent of the campaign seemed extremely narrow: to promote a product among those people who already are viewers, and maybe in the process getting a few others to watch. I mean, unless you knew about the show prior to seeing these lit Mooninites peering down from buildings and underpasses at night, it would mean nothing to you. And without any written description saying it was something on The Cartoon Network or part of a show called, Aqua Lung Teen Fighter or whatever it is, you wouldn’t know where to begin to figure out what it meant. So, it is a fringe show being marketed in a fringe, you’re-in-the-know, insider-joke, outside-the-mainstream manner to a small, core audience. Yet now we get young people bleating about how the authorities should have known what it was and have been more in touch with youth culture. Well, you can’t be fringe and mainstream at the same time, people. They are opposite states of popularity. This is Teen Aqua Man FooFighters (or whatever), not the Simpsons. There’s a difference.

GUERILLA MARKETING
Another line of comments coming out from the younger set is that we older people are not hip enough to recognize guerilla marketing. This was such a hip and cool campaign, we are told, that we older folks don’t even get it. Really? Here is what this marketing campaign, stripped of its light board, essentially was: The putting up of yard sale posters, or signs around town about a lost puppy. Pure genius. The other thing is, it appears that for the most part these signs were stolen almost as quickly as they went up. That is a big part of the reason why other cities hadn’t noticed them. When authorities from these cities went to retrieve the signs after the Boston scare, most were gone. Only because of what happened in Boston, did the show and networks gain any publicity at all. But since it wasn’t their intention to create a bomb scare and attract massive media attention (see first section on INTENT) that means if the marketing campaign went as planned it would have reached almost no one. Good job, folks. We’ll hire you again.

I also read a comment somewhere trying to explain the reasoning behind guerilla marketing. The writer said that guerilla marketing is needed more than ever because with remote controls and now TiVo, young people hardly ever watch commercials anymore. Sounds reasonable. But it is a rather strange thing for a company whose revenue stream is from selling commercial air time to admit by using a guerilla marketing firm. The Cartoon Network is saying, in other words: we know commercial air time is so worthless, we have looked for other ways to advertise.

CONTEXT
Some smug people suggested that these light boards were obviously harmless, and only dolts would think otherwise, and these dolts overreacted. Well, here’s my take on it. Until my job description includes the removing and disarming of potentially explosive devices, then I am not going to second guess the decision by these bomb experts to follow the very detailed protocols put in place. They might even have thought there was a 99 percent chance that these were harmless when they arrived on the scene and took a look at them, but boy that one percent is going to leave a mark. I am sure a Ryder truck parked in front of a Federal building in Oklahoma City looked benign enough until it exploded killing 180 people, including children in a daycare center. Bomb squads always seem to be blowing up someone’s forgotten lunch. But they don’t mess around with this stuff lightly for a very simple reason, that one percent, or one-tenth of a percent could mean people dying. You want their job? You want to make the decision on how cautiously to proceed? You can have it.

Another point about context: Yes, these might look benign after seeing photos of them being put up all lit and everything. But wires and batteries on something attached to a bridge support? That’s what you call a red flag. It is all about context. There were also terrorist alerts going on in London, Washington DC, New York, and an unrelated bomb scare report in Boston that morning. Put yourself in that situation and see how you react.

Put another way, imagine a guy walks into a bank wearing a ski mask. Is the teller he is quickly approaching supposed to assume a) he is there to rob the bank, or b) part of some hip and cool guerilla marketing campaign for an upcoming snowboarding competition. If I were the teller, I would press the silent alarm and let the police sort it out.

LAUGHINGSTOCK
This was the headline last night on MSNBC, taken from a quote from yet another younger generation person over the incident. Oh my, Boston is a laughingstock around the world for overreacting. To which I reply. So what? Who cares? I mean really, what possible difference could it make? It is not the type of thing that hurts tourism - no one is going to decide against visiting here because authorities overreacted in this case. It won’t keep companies from locating in the region, either. The polar opposite outcome would have: Had the city not responded quickly to real explosive devises and as a result things like bridges and train stations were blown apart and people died, then we would take a hit on tourism and with businesses wanting to locate here. To their credit, if a similar incident were to happen today, none of the authorities with the city or state would likely react differently.

OUTCOME
Turner Broadcasting is going to write a huge check to the city to cover the costs involved, and hopefully, much more. They are getting a lot of publicity, but it won’t be free. As for the guerilla marketing firm, they should be lambasted and I hope held accountable. Hey, they should be prepared to accept the consequences, even if it means jail time. After all they are the guerilla marketers here, living on the edge, pushing the envelope. Sometimes the envelope pushes back. That’s the risk they take. As for the two goofballs who were arrested for placing the light boards around Boston, I originally thought they deserved a bit of a break, but after their obnoxious rant about hair and their giggling, I wouldn’t feel too sorry to see the case against them proceed.

The good news is that the city will have carried out a massive, impromptu, counterterrorism drill that eventually will be funded by TBS. Any training is good training. As for the young people who mock the whole event and the reaction by Boston and Massachusetts authorities, that is mostly a matter of age-blurred perception. And youth is a short lived experience that one eventually recovers from. But even in my advanced age of 40-something, I can still see the humor in what happened. As for marketing plans gone awry, it reminds me of a fictitious one. An episode on WKRP in Cincinnati, were a Thanksgiving Day promotion included the dropping of live turkeys from a helicopter. Needless to say, that marketing scheme landed with a thud also.