BURLINGTON Coat Factory, meet the NYPD. An offbeat marketing gimmick slated for later this week may have landed the discount retailer in hot water with New York’s Finest.
The retailer plans to leave 500 unattended messenger bags around lower Manhattan tomorrow and Thursday to promote the opening of its new “store in a store” concept, the Factory. Each bag will contain a gift card worth up to $500 and feature a tag on the outside identifying it as a “gift” from Burlington Coat Factory.
According to store officials, the bags will be left in stores, restaurants and cafes in Chelsea, Union Square and Greenwich Village.
Maybe unattended bags are no big deal in Burlington, NJ — home of the company’s headquarters — but eight years after the 9/11 attacks, with the MTA’s “If you see something, say something” slogan still in full effect, these totes are likely to set off some serious red flags.
A rep for the discount retailer said store officials are in contact with the NYPD and had been advised to keep the bags off public property. A police source said the department is aware of the promotion.
The rep said the bags would be placed on private property, monitored by marketing crews and left in places only where they had received prior authorization from the owner/manager.
Still, the campaign is eerily reminiscent of Boston’s 2007 mass bomb scare in which a Cartoon Network television show, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” became an overnight news sensation — and a p.r. nightmare — when a guerrilla advertising campaign for the show went horribly wrong. In that case, city officials mistook a bunch of blinking boxes around town with the show’s logo for bombs and shut down the city. The head of Cartoon Network had to resign and the station ended up paying the city about $1 million for the trouble.
The Burlington spokeswoman yesterday noted that there are several differences between the two campaigns. “They placed unidentified electronic boxes in public locations. No one was notified. No advance media outreach had occurred, and no one attended these boxes to let people know what the promotion was about,” she said.
A retail source said the marketers behind the new stunt had spoken with bloggers who had covered the Boston fiasco to find out what went wrong.
Maybe so — if we see something, we’re sayin’ something. Even if it’s just to shout, “$500 gift certificate . . . awesome!”