Case Study: When a Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Backfires

Sam Ewen sure got people talking. The police called his agency's marketing campaign "unconscionable." Was it time to get less edgy?.

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Sam Ewen found out about the Boston bomb scare, which he'd apparently created, while riding Amtrak back to New York City from a meeting in Washington, D.C. The office of his small marketing agency, Interference, called to tell him that the company switchboard was lit up with calls. By then CNN and other news networks were in live coverage of "more than a dozen suspicious devices described as 'blinking electronic circuit boards" found under an interstate highway and in other Boston sites. A bomb squad had detonated one of Ewen's mysterious props, and police were looking for answers.

Ewen knew immediately that the 12-person guerrilla marketing agency he'd been building since 2001 was facing the crisis of its life, but he didn't really have time to think about it.

Boston's reaction "was completely unexpected," Ewen says. "This wasn't intended to be controversial, it was intended to be under the radar. So from the moment we heard, we just started acting, and I don't think I thought about [the long-term impact on] my company for 24, maybe 36 hours."

Maybe he should have been prepared for such an overreaction in the post-9/11 world. But the campaign had seemed harmless: Build light-up versions of cartoon characters from a Cartoon Network show and hang them around 10 U.S. cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The show, called Aqua Teen Hunger Force, features the misadventures of anthropomorphized fast food items named Master Shake, Frylock, and Meatwad, and runs on the network's Adult Swim segment. The campaign featured the Mooninites, two-dimensional alien villains that resemble late-1970s video game characters. The goal was to have fans of the show do things like snap digital photos of the devices, known as "throwies," and e-mail the images. It was a stealth campaign, not expected to generate much in the way of headlines, and for two weeks in January, it didn't.

Then, on the morning of Wednesday, January 31, a subway worker at Boston's Sullivan Square station noticed one of the throwies on a support for I-93. The police were called. Because of several factors--it had wires sticking out of it, it was found on a highway on-ramp--it was treated as a potential bomb. Boston-area police shut down highways, bridges, and transit stations before recognizing in midafternoon that they were in fact dealing with cartoon characters.

When officials found out, it got worse. Boston police commissioner Edward Davis called the marketing campaign "unconscionable." Congressman Edward Markey said, "Whoever thought this up needs to find another job."

By Saturday morning, when a reporter ambushed Ewen and his five-year-old daughter in the lobby of his apartment building, he started to wonder. "Is this worth it?" he thought, as he sneaked his daughter past the press. "Can I stay in this business?"

Ewen's campaigns had run into issues before. Public surprise, after all, is part of what makes guerrilla marketing work. (Ewen won't disclose his billings but says his biggest campaigns cost between $200,000 and $500,000.) There hadn't been a problem when he'd had a 30-foot shark fin pulled up and down the Hudson River to promote Discovery Channel's Shark Week (he had cleared it with the Coast Guard), but once he'd had to hire 20 people to remove stickers promoting a financial information provider from lampposts, parking meters, and other things in a city after being threatened with $225,000 in fines. There had never been anything that might wreck his business.

At first all he could do was react. Sitting on that Amtrak train, he contacted the lawyer who handled his contracts. That lawyer suggested another attorney at his firm, Schenck, Price, Smith & King, a partner named Michael K. Mullen. Mullen was a litigator who tended to handle the firm's unusual cases and had a personal perspective on corporate emergencies--Mullen's father was an executive at Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) and was involved in the company's response to the Tylenol tampering in 1982, which has become a textbook example of the right way for companies to handle an unexpected crisis.

Mullen says what happened to Ewen was a microcosm of what happened to J&J--a situation beyond a company's control occurs, with no rule book, its future linked to its response. Mullen advised Ewen not to talk to the press and to focus on supporting his client, Cartoon Network's parent, Turner Broadcasting. That meant he needed to address the concerns of local, state, and federal officials fully while simultaneously pulling the plug on a planned second phase of the campaign. Turner said it would handle press, though the media didn't stop hounding Ewen, who felt he shouldn't be part of the story.

To lower his profile, Ewen took down Interference's website the first night. But his phone was ringing every two or three minutes, almost all of the calls from reporters. Most of his e-mail was also from the media. Ewen says he didn't get an unbroken block of bona fide spam until Sunday.

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