Fear and Terror and Ridiculous, Oh My!

By Jocelyn Geboy in News on Mar 8, 2007 6:15PM

The Police Committee of the City Council decided yesterday that it would be a crime to engage in the sort of guerrilla advertising used by the promoters of "Aqua Teen Hunger Force (ATHF)" earlier this year.

The Sun-Times reports that "businesses would pay through the nose" for this behavior, but at the end of the article, we see that the fine for each individual incident would be $1,000. The committee classifies these acts as leaving things unattended "on the public way, in a public place or on private property without the owner's consent any object that appears to be a bomb or an improvised explosive device." Interesting. So if everyone thinks it looks like a big-ass Lite Brite, we're all good?

Maybe we're spending other people's money, but for the publicity that the ATHF dealio in Boston generated in such a short amount of time, we've got to think an ad agency or a network might not mind shelling out $1,000 for a little well-placed hype here and there. Then again, maybe not.

The real issue, as far as we're concerned, is that people are still so whipped up and fearful that they would think an advertisting tactic was a bomb scare. We're all about "if you see something, say something," and we might have even told someone if we had seen one of these. But we think we would have seen it from a distance, investigated it more closely, and then probably taken a picture and posted it on Flickr. If nothing else, maybe these things need to be clearly marked with the company's logo, identifiying them as a piece of marketing/good old capitalistic fodder.

The reality, as far as Chicago was concerned, is our ration of the ATHF Lite Brite guys went unnoticed. There was no scare, but if they had been explosive Mooninites, we would have been none the wiser. Rock on with your nitpicky selves, City Council, rock on.

"Aqua Teen Hunger Force" by rhi429.