Saturday, February 03, 2007
When viral campaigns attack: lite brite Boston bomb scare
When viral campaigns attack: lite brite Boston bomb scare
If only youtube had a time machine...
Whether you happen to think it’s funny, tragic, or happy-sad (respect to Tim Buckley), what happened Monday in Boston will set a precedent for viral campaigns. Advertising is highly saturation. In place like New York City almost all public wall space is taken up by stickers, flyers, and graffiti. You could easily make the case made that this is a ridiculous over-reaction to a harmless prank. Still, advertisers in America get off pretty light, and one of the minimum responsibilities they have is not to incite panic where foreseeable. It’s a little ironic that over-zealous media pounced on a careless advertising campaign. Certainly there’s enough neglect to go around.
What they did wasn’t art. It was an accidental result of an advertising campaign. Incidentally, this may be what saves them from legal prosecution. However, as my wife put it, in retrospect they should have put their own art up instead of a cartoon character, because at least then their creation would have been instantly world-famous.
To my mind this event really highlights the symbolic nature of the media. One person’s filth is another’s beauty, and one person’s blinking toy is another’s potential bomb. You had to recognize this single image and know what it meant, because there was no explanation provided on the light boxes. In this case I’d argue the context was most important. Attaching pretty much anything box-like to the bottom of a bridge is probably a bad idea, and it’s best not to rely on our police force to be hip ‘nuff to the Internets to recognize a character that doesn’t come on until midnight on cable. If you didn’t make the connection between the cartoon network and the character on the devices, you certainly couldn’t find information on it quickly and easily. What would you google for, “robot giving the finger?”
As a teenager, I grew up going to the MIT flea market, buying odd electronics to solder together with big blobs of solder. If I were lucky, and didn’t zap the components by not wearing ESD protection, I might end up with a theremin. So I’m sympathetic, these guys seem to be a similar breed of tinkerer. Peter Berdovsky (“Zebbler”), one of the arrested, was a student at the Mass Art SIM program. (my wife knew him briefly when she was getting her MFA) Both him and his buddy took great joy in taking the piss on the news, as a daft attempt at turning the situation around to make it into some kind of promotional tool. Kind of funny, but again, kind of sad.
If only youtube had a time machine...
Whether you happen to think it’s funny, tragic, or happy-sad (respect to Tim Buckley), what happened Monday in Boston will set a precedent for viral campaigns. Advertising is highly saturation. In place like New York City almost all public wall space is taken up by stickers, flyers, and graffiti. You could easily make the case made that this is a ridiculous over-reaction to a harmless prank. Still, advertisers in America get off pretty light, and one of the minimum responsibilities they have is not to incite panic where foreseeable. It’s a little ironic that over-zealous media pounced on a careless advertising campaign. Certainly there’s enough neglect to go around.
What they did wasn’t art. It was an accidental result of an advertising campaign. Incidentally, this may be what saves them from legal prosecution. However, as my wife put it, in retrospect they should have put their own art up instead of a cartoon character, because at least then their creation would have been instantly world-famous.
To my mind this event really highlights the symbolic nature of the media. One person’s filth is another’s beauty, and one person’s blinking toy is another’s potential bomb. You had to recognize this single image and know what it meant, because there was no explanation provided on the light boxes. In this case I’d argue the context was most important. Attaching pretty much anything box-like to the bottom of a bridge is probably a bad idea, and it’s best not to rely on our police force to be hip ‘nuff to the Internets to recognize a character that doesn’t come on until midnight on cable. If you didn’t make the connection between the cartoon network and the character on the devices, you certainly couldn’t find information on it quickly and easily. What would you google for, “robot giving the finger?”
As a teenager, I grew up going to the MIT flea market, buying odd electronics to solder together with big blobs of solder. If I were lucky, and didn’t zap the components by not wearing ESD protection, I might end up with a theremin. So I’m sympathetic, these guys seem to be a similar breed of tinkerer. Peter Berdovsky (“Zebbler”), one of the arrested, was a student at the Mass Art SIM program. (my wife knew him briefly when she was getting her MFA) Both him and his buddy took great joy in taking the piss on the news, as a daft attempt at turning the situation around to make it into some kind of promotional tool. Kind of funny, but again, kind of sad.
