It has been an exciting week in new media! Let’s review some of the more spicy things to have occurred:

Cartoon Network CEO resigns after guerilla marketing campaign attracts bomb squad
An aqua teen hunger force
guerilla ad campaign went “sour” this week in Boston when the bomb
squad was sent out to disarm the advertisements. Sour is in quotation
marks as the national media exposure gained from the bomb scare was likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars (an interesting discussion onto itself. I wonder what the effect on ratings will be?).
Nevertheless, a simple lesson to be learned here: whenever you’re
performing a marketing activity on property other than your own, ask
permission first. If it’s your neighbor’s lawn, ask your neighbor. If
it’s a public street, ask the government. Sure, it may be annoying and
delay your campaign launch, but it is just irresponsible to think that
you have the implicit right to use public space as a your marketing
tool.

Barack Obama announced white house candidacy, sets up own “social network”
Talk about preaching to the choir! From the marketer’s perspective, one
of the main virtues of social networks is they allow you to connect
with new customers who are already “qualified” based on their
relationships with current customers. On the flipside, as some past
politicians have realized, having an organized army of youth to perform
your biddings can come in handy.

Bridezilla: viral marketing causing viewers to re-evaluate online authenticity
A YouTube video gets over 2,000,000 views and turns out to be an
advertisement. Nobody blinks an eye, except the “creators” of the
video, who see an opportunity to get free advertising by attempting to
convert the video into something controversial (see their press release). Two points of interest here:
1) There is still a question as to whether or not Sunsilk had anything to do with the video.
2) Is it really a bad thing that web users are finally beginning to
realize that just because something is posted on the Internet, that
does not mean it is true? In my opinion, good marketers shouldn’t be
worried that people might catch on to what they’re doing – they should
be operate marketing campaigns which make people excited about catching
on.

And last but not least…

Anna Nicole Smith dies. Mass media rejoices.
As war explodes in the middle east, new contenders announce their
candidacy for the white house, and former cold war enemies take jabs at
one another, a topless dancer’s drug-related death overtakes TV screens
across the world. The media rejoices at their good fortune: since the
beginning of time, nothing seems to sell better than a stripper.

For the search engine marketers in the audience, it may be of interest to watch Google’s Zeitgeist over the rest of February to observe the change in popularity of the above events.