By now you might have heard about the guerrilla marketing stunt that Bay Area folks thought went over like 10,000 red balloons.
Just that amount of just those things were released by a Southern California video-game company yesterday, part of a promotion for a game based on the highly likely premise of North Korean troops invading the U.S.
Thousands of the balloons, released into the wild from Yerba Buena Gardens, headed straight for the bay, disconcerting environmentalists and other people fed up with cutting-edge marketing tactics that also verge on the mildly sociopathic. (See here and here and here.)
From today’s Chronicle:
“When I looked out the window and saw thousands of balloons dropping straight into the bay, I was flabbergasted,” said Rod Fujita, a senior oceans scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund. “I never expected to see something like this in San Francisco, where there’s such concern about the bay and pollution.”
