Apparently, you can put a price on this kind of publicity.

Turner Broadcasting and Interference Inc., the ad agency responsible for placing 38
electronic promotions-turned-bomb scares around Boston last Wednesday, have agreed to pony up $2 million to make amends for a Lite-Brite-esque Aqua Teen Hunger Force publicity campaign that effectively shut down the city.

This is one time when I think that perpetrator of this PR stunt did nothing wrong, and should not have to pay for the stupidity and overreaction of one cities overzealous police, mayor and congressional representatives. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino is spewing left and right about how he wants to go after those responsible, well according to August J. Pollack:

Menino is going on TV and insisting he’s going to send a 27-year old artist to jail for not breaking any law, because his police department overreacted and wasted a million dollars feeding a media frenzy and terrorizing the population of his own city. That’s a cowardly act of self-preservation, and were he not threatening the life of an innocent young man it would be laughable.

Let’s get a few facts straight on the Aqua Teen Hunger Force sign fiasco:

1. Attorney General Martha Coakley needs to shut up and stop using the word “hoax.” There was no hoax. Hoax implies Turner Networks and the ATHF people were trying to defraud or confuse people as to what they were doing. Hoax implies they were trying to make their signs look like bombs. They weren’t. They made Lite-Brite signs of a cartoon character giving the finger.

2. It bears repeating again that Turner, and especially Berdovsky, did absolutely nothing illegal. The devices were not bombs. They did not look like bombs. They were all placed in public spaces and caused no obstruction to traffic or commerce. At most, Berdovsky is guilty of littering or illegal flyering.

3. The “devices” were placed in ten cities, and have been there for over two weeks. No other city managed to freak out and commit an entire platoon of police officers to scaring their own city claiming they might be bombs. No other mayor agreed to talk to Fox News with any statement beyond “no comment” when spending the day asking if this was a “terrorist dry run.”

4. There is nothing, not a single thing, remotely suggesting that Turner or the guerrilla marketing firm they hired intended to cause a public disturbance. Many have claimed the signs were “like saying ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” Wrong. This was like taping a picture of a fire to the wall of a theater and someone freaked out and called the fire department.

It should be noted that these same devices were placed in 14 other cities weeks before the Boston incident and no one even made a peep. If this is further evidence that this is really much ado about nothing, then I don’t know what is. This either means the rest of the country is a prime target for Al-Queda since we were caught with our pants down, or we (Outside of Beantown) have enough common sense to say this does not look like anything suspect and therefore we should not call in the bomb squad over nothing. It so clearly looks like a cartoon image, and I seriously doubt someone looking to do harm, would take the time to design a pretty interface. But hey. maybe that is just me.