Mar 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Betsy Spethmann

What is it about human nature that makes us want to kick a guy who's down?

A lot of folks took a beating in Boston's bomb scare last month. Cartoon Network's General Manager, Jim Samples: resigned. Its CFO: Shelled out $2 million to cover the bomb squad's overtime.

Boston cops and bomb squad: Ridiculed in chat rooms for mistaking a Lite Brite for a bomb.

Also on the hit list: Interference Inc. CEO Sam Ewen, whose New York agency executed the campaign in 10 cities, nine of them without hysterics. The day after the Boston bungle, other agency execs were falling over themselves to give us their armchair-quarterback take on how Ewen screwed up. Underneath every commentary was a clear sense of relief: There but for the grace of God go I.

Well, here's another chance to jab your competitors. Check out Robinson & Maites' “Weirdest Marketing Programs” poll at RobinsonMaites.com. There's a list of 10 campaigns that you get to vote (and comment) on as either innovation or idiocy.

CEO Alan Maites put up the poll to “generate conversation and challenge the industry,” he says. “We thought it might be a fun annual thing to do at the beginning of the year.”

Maites is quick to point out that he's not ridiculing these campaigns. “We just want people to look at the ways marketers are thinking of themselves as creative.” (But he hasn't posted any of his own agency's work, either — “our clients are much more conservative.”)

The site has gotten several hundred visitors — way more than Maites expected — and most weighed in on all 10 campaigns. A little over half the voters are client-side; fewer than 20% ‘fess up to being from agencies. That leaves around 30% as “unknown,” which could be a nickname for “guys who dodged the bullet with their own risky idea.”

“I wanted to ask the client voters, ‘Would you have approved these ideas in a storyboard?’” Maites says. “Maybe next year.”

A lot of visitors thanked Maites for a chance to weigh in on other agencies' gambles. “People asked, ‘How did you find these?’ They've seen blunders in trade magazines, but they'd never had a chance to say whether they thought something was a good marketing idea.”

There were three clear winners for “Innovation”: White Plains' “way too big water bill” that sent a faux $1,000 tariff to residents whose water meters hadn't been read in two years, prompting them to give an accurate reading (80% voted for it). The “helping panhandlers” project from a Cornell University student who showed homeless people how to use signs with an emotional appeal: “If you give once a month, please consider me.” (A 76% vote.) And the minor league Schaumburg Flyers' “fans manage the team” campaign that let fans vote online to set the lineup for that day's game (74%).

Of course, three campaigns got a swift kick for “Idiocy”: Sportsbook.com's “$100 billboard,” a plexiglass board on the Las Vegas Strip, filled with 100,000 one-dollar bills — 30,000 of which were stolen one night, despite armed guards (78%). Six Flags' “eat a cockroach” deal that let theme park riders cut to the front of the line if they ate a giant hissing cockroach (60%). And KFC's “brand logo visible from outer space,” a 87,500-square-foot painting of Col. Sanders in the Nevada desert (64%).

KFC took a beating for putting its logo near Area 51, famous for 1950s UFO sitings. “What's the demographic profile of an alien, anyway?” one voter sniped. “Aliens are vegans, not meat eaters,” sniffed another.

The other four campaigns? They all drew a pretty close tie between innovation and idiocy, which pretty well sums up the perpetual high-wire act of marketing. Some days it's a cool inside joke, and some days it's criminal. I mean, Cartoon Network's Mooninites played just fine in 9 out of 10 cities, right?

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