New, from Zynga, the company that brought you such exciting social-gaming titles as FarmVille and Mafia Wars comes their latest attempt at bombarding you with advertisement: innumerable fake $25,000 bills stuck all over the sidewalks of Hayes St. Fake bills that, according to the SF Examiner, each take 45 minutes to clean from the sidewalk.
The paper-wasting scheme is meant to promote Zynga’s latest incarnate of Mafia Wars, Mafia Wars: Las Vegas. However, this “guerrilla marketing” technique is apparently a crime in itself.
So, the San Francisco City Attorney is going after Zynga in an effort to get them to “compensate the City for all costs, punish the wrongdoing, and publicly discourage similar illicit conduct by other would-be corporate vandals,” sending a strongly worded letter to Zynga’s chief council.
As SFWeekly quotes Deputy City Attorney Alex Tse, “The City Attorney takes violations such as these very seriously, and intends to pursue every available cause of action aggressively against Zynga for these illegal marketing tactics.”
Both the Weekly and Ex note that a tactic such as this isn’t new but, as commenter (and Appeal pal) Greg Dewar points out, “many Hollywood film studios…have done far worse,” and points out this sidewalk-defacing marketing said to be for the Wall Street Journal.
How consistent should our city be when going after these street marketing efforts? Let’s hear what you think in our poll.
