Guerrilla Marketing Gone Wild

In the wake of the Boston brouhaha over a Turner Broadcasting marketing campaign, industry experts are wondering how far is too far

by Douglas MacMillan and Helen Walters

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To Richard Notarianni, executive creative director of media at Euro RSCG Worldwide, the scene in Boston on Feb. 1 had eerie, historic overtones of one October day in 1938, when a radio broadcast of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds adaptation had listeners all over the country believing a militant fleet of Martians had landed in New Jersey. This time, however, the hoaxer was a major media conglomerate, the invaders were boxes of light-emitting-diode lights crudely resembling cartoon Moon-men, and the medium was guerrilla marketing.

As you may have heard by now, the campaign was for Turner Broadcasting System, the multibillion-dollar offspring of Ted Turner and a subsidiary of Time Warner (TWX). For three weeks in January, Turner teamed up with New York guerrilla agency Interference Inc. to deploy 400 LED light displays in 10 cities: Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Austin, Tex. The signs, which lacked any text or call to action, showed an alien character called a "Mooninite" from the cartoon series and upcoming movie Aqua Teen Hunger Force, displaying his middle finger. It was all part of a plan to promote its eccentric, nighttime, college-crowd brand of programming Adult Swim.

While other cities took little notice, some residents of Boston mistook the batteries and wires protruding from the devices for explosives and notified authorities. The city quickly shut down major transportation corridors and spent close to $500,000 deploying police and bomb-sniffing dogs. Turner Broadcasting took responsibility for the stunt, issuing an apology and paying $1 million to the city and $1 million in "good will" funds towards homeland security.

What Price Success?

In the days since then, at least 1,000 print and online news stories have covered the event. Blogs have buzzed continuously about what the news means for the cartoon, the network, the advertising industry, even for America's belabored War on Terror. The two men responsible for installing the devices appeared at a press conference, only to refuse to discuss the incident. T-shirts emblazoned with the cartoon character were instantly available for sale online. According to data from Nielsen Media Research, the average number of American households who viewed Aqua Teen Hunger Force rose 5%, to 1,082,500, during the week of Jan. 29 to Feb. 4, from 1,030,500 during the week of Jan. 22 to Jan. 28, and traffic to Cartoon Network's Web site spiked 105.2%, to 790,000, on Feb. 1, from 385,000 one week before.

For considerably less than the cost of a 30-second TV spot on the Super Bowl, Turner certainly got the word out about its obscure cartoon. So the campaign was a success, right? Not so fast. Turner's spokesperson maintains, "I don't think anybody [in Turner] is looking at the buzz we've had from this as a success," while industry insiders grumble that the campaign was a misuse of guerrilla tactics that misjudged the times and will only make things more difficult for others in the future.

The term guerrilla first entered the advertising lexicon in 1984, when industry veteran Jay Conrad Levinson penned a book with the title Guerrilla Marketing (Houghton Mifflin). Then, Levinson defined the medium as an investment of time, energy, and imagination rather than money, ideal for prudent entrepreneurs who ran small businesses. In recent years, however, guerrilla initiatives have been pursued by large corporations looking to stand out from the clutter and noise of traditional media (see BusinessWeek.com, 8/4/06, "Advertising: When Guerrilla Goes Bourgeois"). Live performance stunts, coded messages, multisensory ads, and other unconventional campaigns have become an effective means to reach into the private worlds of consumers and engage them in a memorable experience with brands.