A bomb squad was called to an Australian news station after a Watch Dogs PR stunt was mistakenly believed to be a terrorist threat.
A package was delivered to the Ninemsn offices yesterday which contained a safe, as pictured below.
A note attached to the safe told its addressee to check their voicemail, but as the addressee didn’t have access to voicemail they therefore decided to punch in a code on the safe’s keypad instead. That’s when the safe started beeping.
As Mumbrella reports, the panicked staff promptly called other news stations to see whether they had received a similar package, but when it was revealed that they hadn’t, they decided to call the bomb squad to take care of the mysterious safe. The bomb squad arrived, and the safe was found to be containing a copy of Watch Dogs, a baseball cap and a beanie hat, all courtesy of Ubisoft.
Speaking of the incident, Ninemsn’s Hal Crawford said: “This is definitely the other side of the line in terms of what it’s safe for a PR company to send anonymously to a newsroom. The thing was black, heavy and slightly creepy.
“We did check with other newsrooms to see if they had received a similar package as we thought it was a PR stunt, but no-one else had. We weren’t panicked at any point, but given there was no note explaining what it was, we had to take sensible precautions”.
Though this understandably shook up the Ninemsn news team, they should at least be happy that they received a copy of Watch Dogs, which we praised as being an “example of how a publisher can score big in the new generation by taking a risk” in our review.
At the time of this writing, Ubisoft has not issued a statement regarding the PR stunt and the ensuing chaos it caused.
