Over on Courthouse News, Tim Hull reports that an advertising firm and Toyota are being sued because an advertising campaign terrorized an email recipient:
A woman says a “terror marketing” campaign that Saatchi & Saatchi created for Toyota made her believe a drunken English soccer hooligan with a pit bull would show up at her home expecting to crash on her couch. She says the defendants sent her a series of anonymous emails in which a fictional man claimed he knew her address and planned to “lay low at your place for a bit. Till it all blows over. Bringing Trigger.”
Amber Duik says she was terrorized by the “nontraditional promotion” called “The Other You.” In her Superior Court complaint, Duik says the anonymous series of emails left her “constantly in tears and shaking and sobbing in emotional distress” during the entire month of April 2008.
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Eventually an actor in the “movie” revealed that the entire ordeal was a hoax, and that Duik had been “punked” by Toyota as part of a marketing campaign for its Matrix automobile.
Duik says she was so terrified by the emails that her boyfriend began sleeping with a club and Mace. She says she was convinced that “a violent criminal on the run from the police both in England and the United States” was making his way down the California coast to her home.
Duik seeks $10 million in punitive damages for fraud, negligent misrepresentation, deceptive advertising, emotional distress, consumer law violations and other charges.