Aqua Teen Hunger Force Guerilla Marketing

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Guerilla Marketing Gone Apes To promote the new Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie, Turner Broadcasting Network teamed up with Guerilla Interference Inc. The Goal: Deploy 400 LED “LiteBright” displays within 10 major cities.LiteBright Part of the marketing plan was to promote The Cartoon Network’s eccentric, nighttime, college-crowd brand of programming Adult Swim.

Guerilla Marketing Gone Apes Some of Boston’s residents mistook the devices for explosives and contacted authorities. The city quickly reacted and shut down all major public transportation and spent $500,000 deploying police and bomb sniffing dogs. Turner Broadcasting was fined $1,000,000 from the city of Boston and also paid $1,000,000 to “goodwill” funds to homeland security.

Results In the days since the event: Made national televised news The average number of American households who viewed Aqua Teen Hunger Force rose 5%, to 1,082,500, from the previous week of 1,030,500 viewers. T-shirts were instantly available for sale portraying the controversial characters. Web site spiked 105.2%, to 790,000 from 385,000 one week before. Total US Gross: $5,520,368 US DVD Sales: $11,084,232 Movie Budget: $750,000

Ethical Breach? Turner Broadcasting failed to notify the major cities about what was going on. The lack of communication cost them unnecessary fines. The Ethics Code published by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association stresses honesty of relationship, honesty of opinion, and honesty of identity. “Human Spam?”Spam

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