No surprise to us that Turner Broadcasting was willing to wipe the egg off its corporate face with a stamped-paid invoice for a sum totalling upwards of $500,000 in stockholder cash to pay the City of Boston for services so dramatically rendered during Tuesday's bomb-scare prank.

After all, having the knowhow to pick the right kind of agency (schlocky) to do the right kind of promo (schlocky) for the right kind of (schlocky) product in order to hype an audience of mind-numbed zombies for a drug-related nighttime cable-TV program: You get what you pay for, and the Cartoon Network appropriately got -- and continues to get -- about a gazillion dollars' worth of top-line, front-page publicity.

Of course it's the kind of publicity most companies would go out of their way to avoid --- think: notoriety -- but as the guy carrying the bag and shovel behind the elephant tells the parade watchers everywhere he goes: Hey, man, this is show biz. 

As for the agency, who else but this particular set of geniuses could have thought up getting dozens of live, on-duty city cops to tie up traffic, piss off thousands of motorists and pedestrians, scare millions of TV viewers and make public asses of themselves for an entire day on radio and TV -- without once stepping out of character?

As for the marketing part, the message is clear: There's nothing like a multi-site, multi-agency, multi-city, multi-market, daytime/drivetime, early-prime/prime, experiential promotion to generate awareness and build traffic on a massive nationwide scale for the debut of a worthless piece of ...well, you get the picture.

But that's just one opinion. What's yours?