TimeWarner’s PR Disaster
The faces of TimeWarner executives are understandly beat red this morning as the company attempts to put invoke damage control on what was certainly a horrible marketing idea gone terribly wrong.
Yesterday, parts of the city of Boston was in virtual lockdown for several hours as bomb squads were scrambled to check on several odd looking packages left around the city. The packages were part of a marketing campaign involving a character from the Turner Broadcasting Company’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force program that appears on the company’s Cartoon Network station. TimeWarner is the parent company of Turner Broadcasting, CNN, AOL, Time magazine, etc.
What amazes me about this incident is that it went on for so long before someone notified the police that the packages were part of a publicity stunt. Although the news media isn’t focusing that deeply on the internal make up of the Turner Broadcasting Company’s public relations department just yet, it does show to me some glaring problems with the way that the company handles publicity:
No clearly established public relations guidelines — Once the situation hit the news someone at Turner should have contacted the police to tell them that the packages were part of a publicity stunt. Instead, hours went by before someone fessed up. By that time the damage was already done.
Lack of coordination between TimeWarner (TWX) companies — While the hoax was in progress, TWX’s CNN was on top of the story reporting the situation like everyone else was — a potential terrorist plot in the making. You wonder if TWX ever gathers their PR people together to share internal intelligence or if they simply act alone.
TimeWarner will and should shoulder most of the blame seeing that they own the company and the network involved. It is damage control time at TWX and if Chairman and CEO Richard Parsons is proactive the company will handle the problem today by making a formal apology and offering to pay financial damages for all of the trouble that this stunt has caused.
Yes that story was quite amazing. I’m just surprised that none of the corporate types that approved this ad campaign had the common sense to figure out that this would cause mass panic. Even more amazing is that this is an ad campaign that I figure aims to promote a new cartoon. Children are not going to run around a city looking for these devices. If they really wanted to promote this cartoon they would have characters dressed up at day cares or schools, etc. TimeWarner really should have thought this through.
Good points, Shark99. It gets worse too as this cartoon is for adults, not kids. The character depicted was shown with his middle finger raised and similar boxes were located in other cities.
I heard one more disquieting reaction from Turner Broadcasting, but I need to verify the comments before I mention them here.