GLOBAL – NOVEMBER 2010 – It’s not the work of your average terrorist. Letter bombing is a form of "internet vandalism"–a group of people get together and post in succession to spell out a message using pictures of letters as their profile photos. BBDO’s Jeff Greenspan, Chris Baker, and Danny Adrian demonstrated letter bombing after a failed pitch for Stephen Colbert’s parody political campaign to ‘Keep Fear Alive’. They gathered a group of people in one room to letter bomb different facebook pages to spell out, ‘Keep Fear Alive’. The facebook pages that got bombed belonged to Fox News, Sarah Palin, The Daily Show, and even Justin Bieber.
Impressed by the impact of letter bombing, BBDO’s other clients, and even other companies are catching on to the trend. BBDO went on to letter bomb Governor David Paterson with ‘Sign the Autism Bill’, and there are plans for a letter bombing campaign for Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012.
While eyecatching, the tactic pushes the line between guerrilla advertising and internet trolling. Letter Bombing does work on the principle of flooding, needing a series of posts for its message to be spelled out. For BBDO’s clients in this round, it’s well executed in being carried out for either a good cause (the Autism bill), or that being done over fan pages is consistent with the product’s satirical personality (Colbert). But if this kind of barrage were carried out on a personal profile wall, it wouldn’t look any different from the work of spambots, would it? Same principle after all, even if it’s not as pretty.
Source: Post Advertising
