Gilbert K. Chesterton on art

"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere."

AquateenhungerforceEven though I'm a Boston guy (or maybe because I'm a Boston guy), I wasn't going to chime in on the Boston marketing massacre. I figured that it had been fully fleshed out by both mainstream and social media.  In fact, the search term "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" just returned 2,930,000 hits on Google, with hundreds of blog posts and references to reports by the NY Times, USA Today, CNN, Reuters, Forbes, ABC News, the San Francisco Chronicle, Hollywood Reporter, E! Online, BusinessWeek, Salon, the Belfast Telegraph, News24 South Africa, Xinhuanet China, etc.

I like Chesterton's pun, and I'm sensitive to the inconvenience touched off by Interference Inc.'s stunt (although I think my fellow Bostonians need to lighten up a bit). Perhaps a line should have been drawn, I'm not really sure.  But who is going to define that line?  To me, this piece of guerrilla marketing was no more than that; a promotional stunt.  No one was intentionally trying to incite a panic.  Assuming that was the case, what are we to do about the impending onslaught of these types of public antics?  Even Thomas Jefferson agreed that "taste cannot be controlled by law."

Perhaps we should have done what the folks in New York City, Los Angeles, California, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco, and Philadelphia did: ignore it. Because when all is said and said and said and done, this event will turn out to be a clear home run (albiet a serendipitous one) for Turner Broadcasting's product.  We'll soon be seeing those boxy-looking, profane Mooninite characters on everything 18-to-24 year old guys wear and consume.  Like it or not, the unexpected Boston drama has captured the public's fascination and entered our everyday conversations - today's holy grail of marketing.  And guess what?  You . . . yea you, Time's Person of the Year, are the ones who helped Turner achieve it. ;)

Posted February 2, 2007
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Comments

Felix Gerena

Hi tom, what I am seing in some TV programs is that they deliberately croos the line to become more popular. Some programs invite people who act as incendiaries and audiences increse dramatically. The scary thing is that the whole thing is programmed in advance and that people follow the system blindly. Companies are interested in masses, not in individuals and that is why they don't care crossing the line.

Posted by: Felix Gerena | February 10, 2007 at 04:52 AM

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