Fearing the Flu & Cartoon Bombs

It was an interesting day in the news.

Fearing the Flu. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are set to release 108 pages of guidelines for states to follow in the event of a flu pandemic. Though no one from the Centers are officially talking about the document before it's released, several commentators have said that it calls for a staged response to a flu pandemic. All stages include some type of voluntary quarantine of the families members of people who are infected.

When I heard the report this morning, I started down that long, dark tunnel of analysis that my husband claims all lawyers enter when confronted with a legal question. What kind of legal issues would a flu pandemic present for my business clients?

Here are some issues that I thought of -

When can employees return to work after a voluntary quarantine?
What if an employee who is under a voluntary quarantine comes to work?
Is an employee under a voluntary quarantine on vacation, sick or unpaid leave?
What if the school of an employee's child is closed and the employee can't attend work?
What if some employees can work from home and other's cannot?
If a supplier defaults on a contract, is a flu pandemic a force majeure (act of God)?

I'm sure there are many more. If you think of any, post a comment.

Cartoon Bombs. In what will go down as the biggest snafu in guerrilla marketing history, the Cartoon Network placed "guerrilla graffiti light installations" in public locations in Boston. Police responded by shutting down Interstate 93 and several other roads, closing two bridges between Boston and Cambridge and halting boat traffic on the Charles River. At least one of the installations was detonated by the bomb squad.

The devices were placed in the public locations by Interference, Inc. a guerrilla marketing agency who describes itself as a "nationwide guerrilla and alternative marketing agency from idiation through tactile implementation and staffing."

Turner Broadcasting's PR machine quickly issued a statement apologizing and that they notified officials of all locations of the devices as soon as they were aware that there was a problem. Interference, Inc., a much smaller company, did not comment. Its website is not operational and the CEO, Sam Ewen, could not be located.

Back in 2001, Sam Ewen was interviewed by atnewyork.com. In response to a question on the effectiveness of guerrilla marketing, he said:

"There are quite a few ways to tell if a campaign is working or not. If there is a promotion involved, you can use a promotion code, a unique URL or a special 800 number to track actual responses. Or, you can look at actual sales during the time of the campaign. If it's more like a brand building campaign, you look at general traffic at a site or store. The neat thing about guerrilla marketing is that the media can buy into it and the campaign becomes the story."

Well, this campaign certainly became a story and the media coverage was huge. Something tells me that the result will not be a large number of Bostonians tuning in to Aqua Teen Hunger Force on Cartoon Network. More likely, they'll be tuning into Court TV to see the results. According to Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, the city is prepared to take civil or criminal action against those responsible. "This is a heavy penalty, imprisonment, two to five years for each one of them," he said. "When it comes to public safety, we are throwing everything at them."

Next time Cartoon Network and Interference Inc. are "idiating" a guerrilla marketing campaign, they might want to check in with their lawyers first.