Viewing figures for Aqua Teen Hunger Force the week before the Boston incident: 380,000
Viewing figures for Aqua Teen Hunger Force the week AFTER the Boston incident?
Nice lift. Just shows you what all those mentions in all those blogs can do for a brand.
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I'm sure its done a lot for brand familiarity, but that's only neccessary for a competitive product people actually buy, like cars or soda pop. Its a cartoon! Kids who watch cartoons already knew about it; people who don't watch cartoons aren't going to start just because they know the name of this one.
386,000
For all the hype about the ATHF Boston dust up, I still don't know any more about the show, the characters, or why I should watch than I did before.
It's a stunt, and unless the stunt says something about the brand or product, it ain't gonna do squat for you. That's why everyone knows subservient chicken, but no one actually went out and bought a chicken sandwich.
Muggler, would you call yourself their target viewer?
The jury's still out as to the effectiveness of the Boston mess, as the stunt was intended to promote the upcoming ATHF movie, not the show. But I'll bet downloads on YouTube were pretty brisk in the following days.
As for Subservient, according to Adweek...
BK reported that sales had steadily increased an average of 9 percent a week. Since then, Geis says the company has seen "double-digit" growth of awareness of the TenderCrisp Chicken.
I'm no Crispin fan, but those results sound pretty good to me.
I'm just sayin.
I think this is a case of just the wrong kind of publicity. What will stick in people's minds about this stunt is "terrorism scare", "over-reacting city officials" and maybe "hairstyles of the 70's". None of which has anything to do with ATHF. At least subservient chicken got the word "chicken" stuck in your mind which is what they were trying to sell in that case.
Of course, that's not really the fault of the marketers here. This wasn't a forseen consequence. Makes you wonder what the forseen consequence was though and how effective this type of marketing really is.
Maybe that's the wrong place to look. Let's face it, we live in an on demand culture, what were the figures for people searching "mooninites" on the video sites like youtube and ifilm? I bet they went up considerably. That's who they were marketing to, young web surfers.
It's a new world, all that used to be has changed and is changing constantly. Old units of measurement don't apply.