EAST PROVIDENCE – A graphic design firm’s offbeat marketing campaign backfired when a few of the company’s clients mistook test-tube vials they received in the mail for a terrorist attack and called the police.

Shazamm – a Pawtucket-based firm founded in 1999 – was acquired in May by Atrion Networking Corp. of Warwick. (READ MORE) Shazamm’s founder and president, Dana Paul, said the company had been looking for a creative way to publicize the new division’s services to the Atrion client base.

The marketers decided to send out small cardboard boxes marked “CLASSIFIED,” each of which contained a test-tube-like vial of green liquid. The mailing directed recipients to visit a Web site called www.dna-fusion.com.

The site is a mock-YouTube page featuring what at first appears to be a home video of someone opening one of the boxes and examining the test-tube inside. Fake green slime splashes across the screen before the video fades into an animation providing information about the new division and its services. The idea was, the green liquid would represent the fusion of Shazamm into Atrion’s DNA.

The boxes were mailed on Wednesday to businesses in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

“Unfortunately, some people just kind of overreacted to it,” Paul said. A small number of companies that received the boxes were so alarmed, they called the police, apparently concerned the shipment might constitute a biological or chemical attack, he said.

“We’re very apologetic for any kind of craziness it may have caused,” Paul told PBN in a telephone interview from the East Providence police station, where he was straightening out the mishap. “It was all supposed to be done in fun.”

After receiving an alarmed phone call, East Providence Police Capt. Walter Barlow said, his department called in the hazardous materials team from the R.I. State Fire Marshal’s office, and also notified the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, which investigated and determined that the box and its contents were harmless. A bank in Massachusetts was evacuated after receiving another such box, Barlow said.

As a precaution, his department sent out a teletype message to all law-enforcement agencies in New England describing the box and its contents, and letting them know it does not pose a threat.

Despite the confusion, Barlow was good-natured about the situation, comparing it to the light-up boxes that panicked Boston in January 2007 but turned out to be a promotion for the Cartoon Network. He said the police do not plan to press charges.

“Basically, it was an advertising scheme that maybe wasn’t so well thought-out,” Barlow said. “It was a pretty decent marketing idea, but if they had given somebody a little advance notice,” it might have allayed any concern.

Paul said that the people who work at Shazamm would never have intentionally tried to cause mischief. “I just don’t think like that – and we don’t think like that as a company, both Atrion and Shazamm,” he said. “I mean, if people had told us to create a campaign that caused this to happen, we couldn’t have done it.”

However, he added, most of the response to the campaign has been “extremely positive,” with only about 10 percent of the boxes’ recipients reacting negatively.

When it was mentioned to Paul that the campaign had now garnered him far more publicity than he anticipated, he replied: “Isn’t that interesting? … People don’t tell stories about good things. It’s unfortunate they have to tell a story about something crazy.”

Shazamm Global Interactive Agency, a subsidiary of Atrion Networking Corp., is a multimedia marketing and communications firm with offices in Providence and New York City. To learn more, visit www.shazamm.net.