Have companies taken advertising campaigns a little too over the top?

I have just read an article from Doug Brown, he is a advertising and marketing blogger from Victoria in British Columbia. The article was about “marketing terrorism”. Like many of you I was wondering what marketing terrorism actually meant because marketing and advertising isn’t my area of expertise. From what I can gather from Doug’s post, marketing terrorism is when companies hire actors to do something in the middle of a public place, the stuff they do can range from flash mob dances to a live action scene from the film they are promoting.

An example of a live action scene in public would probably be the time that two actors started a fight in the middle of a lift and started to strangle each other with some wire. All this was done to promote a film called dead man down and the fighting was a re-enactment of a crucial scene from the film.

  

The picture above is a screen grab from a video of the public elevator fight that was part of a promotion campaign for Dead Man Down. As you can see, this does look very real and actually terrified members of the public, some people stood frozen in shock whilst others stood and took pictures of the incident.

I must admit that it is a good way to get the public attention and would definitely get a lot of media coverage which is obviously excellent for the film crews and production companies but as Doug said in his post this sort of thing could de-sensitise us to real crimes and some people could be witnessing a real kidnap and think that it is just another silly film promotion prank and pay no attention to it, thus putting the life of the kidnap victim in danger. The criminals must love the idea of this development, can you imagine the amount of crimes they could get away with by just pretending they are actors promoting a film or videogame! 

It’s obvious that there are good and bad elements to things like this but just like anything dangerous or daring, it will always end in tears.

Visit Doug’s blog for his article on this subject and here is the link to the video from the telegraph’s Youtube page