Turner pays Boston $2 million for ‘Aqua Teen’ scare

Steve Safran February 6th, 2007

Turner Broadcasting has agreed to pay Boston-area authorities $2 million after last week’s marketing-stunt-gone-haywire surrounding the Cartoon Network’s “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.” $1 million will cover the costs incurred by Boston and two neighboring cities. The other $1 million will go toward local homeland security programs. (When the story broke, Boston said it spent $250,000 on the scare. Funny how that number went up eightfold once the city heard that Turner was behind the signs.) Still, this is short money for Turner. How do you quantify the amount of publicity the $2 million generated? I’ll bet it resulted in tens of millions of dollars of exposure for Cartoon Network. Nobody wants to admit it, but this wasn’t a publicity stunt gone bad. This was a publicity stunt that went exceedingly well.