Got to give credit to out-of-home pundit Andrea MacDonald for perhaps the line of the conference. During an otherwise dry-ish panel discussion Thursday, she recounted a campaign on the New York Subway
for the Bronx Zoo, where creative consisted entirely of snake images. A female rider freaked out (she suffered from ophidiophobia, fear of snakes) and sued the MTA. MacDonald's take: "Snakes on a
train." MacDonald also cited some interesting tidbits about attracting a captive audience, like a Millward Brown study that showed 50% of respondents said their primary news source at work are
those screens from Captivate in the elevators. Guess that's the 50% not passing time surfing the 'net.
They should be grateful the ad campaign wasn't in Boston's train system. They'd have FBI agents searching the city for all traces of snakeskin and wrapping the zoo in a circle of tanks!
It's more likely she freaked out that anyone would follow so closely in the footsteps of the extremely public (though now hardly mentioned) failure of the Most Amazing "Buzz Marketing Has Arrived" Campaign of 2006. Recommended treatment: IV drip of common sense.