Well, that was one damned expensive guerrilla marketing campaign. Turner Broadcasting Systems has agreed to pay the City of Boston (and some other entities) $2 million and to formally apologize to settle the bill for the havoc they caused last week. They manage to dodge any civil or criminal proceedings by doing so. Probably the smartest thing they could have done. They would have been bled white by bad publicity if they'd gone into court battle after court battle.
BOSTON – Turner Broadcasting Systems and a marketing company have agreed to pay $2 million compensation and apologize for their advertising campaign that caused a widespread terrorism scare, the attorney general said Monday.
The agreement with several state and local agencies resolves any potential civil or criminal claims against Turner and Interference Inc., said Attorney General Martha Coakley.
Authorities feared bombs had been planted when they found more than three dozen blinking electronic signs with a boxy cartoon character giving an obscene hand gesture Wednesday in Boston, Cambridge and Somerville.
The signs, part of a publicity campaign for Cartoon Network's "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," also appeared in nine other big U.S. cities in recent weeks, but created little interest.
But in Boston, bomb squads responded to reports of the devices in a subway station, on bridges and elsewhere.
As part of the settlement, $1 million will be used to reimburse the agencies and $1 million will be used to fund homeland security and other programs. Turner Broadcasting, a division of Time Warner Inc., and Interference Inc. also will issue a public statement accepting full responsibility and apologizing for the incident.
They are actually wiring the money to Boston today, so that is some really quick work on the part of the company's lawyers. As I said, I think they're smart to do this.
Isn’t that about the price of a superbowl ad? I’d say that it was marketing money well spent. A company like that would have an advertising budget in the 10′s or even 100′s of millions (though not for only the Aqua-Teen-whatever).
I had never heard of this show before this happened and if I was their target audience I would be amused at the “panic” of all those stuffy law and order types. I’d call the whole thing a success from that standpoint.
Which is why I’d prefer jail-time with that reimbursement check. You can’t take back publicity but you can make the perpetrators mighty uncomfortable. Because no matter how hip they thought it was it wasn’t funny in the least.