No Longer A Laughing Matter

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Is the “Punk’d” craze becoming hazardous to the health of corporate America?

Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc. in Torrance might think so, considering the way a recent online prank campaign turned out.

The American unit of the Japanese automaker and the Torrance office of Saatchi & Saatchi Inc. were sued last month by a woman claiming she was “terrorized” by an ad campaign intended to create buzz for Toyota’s sporty Matrix.

The online ad enlisted viewers to play a prank on a friend through a Web site that generated bogus e-mails to identified friends.

The L.A. woman claims that the e-mails she received so terrified her that she couldn’t sleep and became physically ill. Although the prank was started by a friend, she claims she didn’t realize that when she got the e-mails from a man with a name she didn’t know. He disclosed details about her life and he wrote that he was on a road trip to Los Angeles in his Matrix with his pit bull and that he planned to stay with her, according to the lawsuit.

In a joint statement to the Business Journal, Toyota and the ad agency said they will vigorously defend the allegations, because the woman agreed in an initial e-mail to receive ad materials from the company.

Practical jokes took off as a media phenomenon after actor Ashton Kutcher hosted “Punk’d,” a practical joke show on MTV modeled after the famous “Candid Camera” program. Another show called “Pranked” also airs.

Karl Greenberg, an editor at New York-based online marketing publication MediaPost Marketing Daily, said he realizes that carmakers are doing what they can to attract young consumers but they have to be careful about going too far.

“If you are marketing to generation Y consumers between the ages of 20 and 30, this is the kind of thing they will do to get attention,” said Greenberg. “But the real risk for Toyota is that it’s a potentially damaging thing to do, because it seems sophomoric and the opposite of what Toyota would ultimately like to do to support the brand.”

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