Two years ago, Amber Duick started getting emails from a 25-year-old English soccer fan named Sebastian Bowler. In his first email, he wrote, "Amber mate! Coming 2 Los Angeles. Gonna lay low at your place for a bit. Till it all blows over. Bringing Trigger."
She didn't know the dude, and did not respond. The next day, he emailed again with her home address, calling it a "Nice place to hide out," telling her that his pitbull, Trigger, "don't throw up much anymore, but put some newspaper down in case." He included a link to his MySpace page to remind her of who he was. She still did not recognize him and started to freak out about the fact that he planned to come to her home.
The English fugitive continued emailing her as he drove across the country to her home, sending photos of the road trip and describing his evasion of the police. "I seem to have lost the coppers for now, so I'm all good, mate… Had a brush with the law last night. Anyway, hopefully I'll have lost them by the time I get to your place." In one email, he said that he "had a problem" at a hotel. Duick shortly thereafter got an email from a motel manager with a bill for damage that Bowler the delinquent had done to his room. The soccer hooligan had smashed the T.V.
Now, at this point, many of you are probably thinking that you would have called the police, but Duick apparently did not. Five days after Bowler started emailing her, Duick finally got an email with a link to a video that informed her that it was all a prank orchestrated by Toyota and the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi. It was an elaborate advertising campaign designed to promote the car Bowler had been fleeing the authorities in, the Toyota Matrix. A friend (or frenemy) had signed Duick up to participate; Duick said she didn't realize she had given her consent to participate, when Toyota had sent her a personality test by email a few days before Bowler started harassing her.
Viral/guerrilla marketing is all the rage these days, as companies try to come up with exciting new ways to pitch their products. They're often amusing and get lots of media attention, but I've raised concerns before about people feeling like victims of hoaxes and then being turned off the product.
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The Toyota Matrix "YourOtherYou" campaign was aimed at 20-year-old males who love pranks. In this case, Duick was really turned off. She was terrified, she says, in a $10 million lawsuit [pdf, via Wired] against Toyota and its advertising company for intentional infliction of emotional distress and unfair, unlawful, and deceptive trade practices, among other claims. Said legal scholar Jonathan Turley when this lawsuit was first filed in L.A. in 2009: "I am astonished that any lawyer reviewed this campaign and approved it."
A judge has decided to let the lawsuit drive forward and go to a jury, assuming Toyota doesn't settle it first.
he bargaining deadline.