Wrangler Europe's attempt to empower women ended in powerful PR failure.
The brand launched the campaign with the claim that they wanted to "change the conversation to what women DO and not just how they look." Partnering with New Zealand pop artist Kimbra, they released a video with lyrics like:
She's changing the conversationWith a whole new exaltation Say - I'll be who I be Won't let the world tell me no differently Ain’t about what's behind me
And it has imagery like:
The video eventually shares the whole woman, but the focus on bums tends to undermine the whole point of the attempt at socially-responsible advertising.
Oh, IBM. What were you thinking? In a fiasco similar to the European Union's ill-conceived "Science: It's a Girl Thing" video, IMB has been called out by actual women scientists and engineers for this video:
August 9 was National Women's Day in South Africa, and Bic SA's social media team tried to share an empowering captioned image. The only problem was, it wasn't really empowering at all.
Reaction was swift and sharp, including this hack:
Hi everyone. Let’s start out by saying we’re incredibly sorry for offending everybody - that was never our intention, but we completely understand where we’ve gone wrong. This post should never have gone out. The feedback you have given us will help us ensure that something like this will never happen again, and we appreciate that.
It still shouldn't have happened in the first place, but at least it opens a helpful conversation. Especially for an international brand with a bad history of gender stereotyping.
Oh, dear. A fitness supplement brand in the UK has taken it upon itself to become the patron saint of body shaming.
The Drum reports that, faced with online criticism over its "are you beach body ready?" ad campaign, Protein World decided not only to be unapologetic, but downright nasty:
That particular exchange was started by blogger Laurence Hebbard, who wrote about their confrontational social media engagement on Social Media London. Here are some of the curated exchanges:
As of this writing, the protein shake maker is completely unapologetic. They seem quite happy to bask in the negative publicity (as well as the many Tweets of support from fans).
Adopting "being an asshole" as a brand strategy is a risky move, but not an unprecedented one. Now it's just a matter of seeing how many assholes are willing to self-identify by buying the stuff.
It's easy to see how this happened: Whoever manages the DiGiorno frozen pizza Twitter account saw a trending hashtag, #whyistayed, and completely misunderstood it.
From the Tweet above, it looks like they assumed the meme was about staying in a tired relationship. It was actually used by survivors of domestic abuse to share their stories, like "I thought I could change him," and "I didn't know he was abusing me." It runs parallel to another hashtag, #whyileft, and both allow strangers to create a huge, virtual support group.
The DiGiorno Tweet was a huge mistake, making it as far as coverage in Time. The administrator has been performing due penance, apologizing individually, over and over again, to people who called them on it.
The moral of the story? Educate yourself. Not just about what hashtags and memes are really about, but deeper on the underlying social issues that drive them.
And when you do screw up, make it right. Even if you are just a pizza brand.
Thanks to Audra Williams (via Facebook) for the tip.
Joe La Pompe first made me aware of this. According to the Globe and Mail, Metro Trains, the Australian client for whom the original ad was made, has embarked on a global licensing program to make money from the cartoon song's popularity. Empire Life stated, “The message ... aims to make the topics of death and life insurance more approachable and remind consumers that the unexpected happens every day.”
What a stupid idea... for both Empire Life and Metro.
First of all, the viral potential of the cartoon has already been tapped worldwide. Thanks to international ad blogs, the PSA is already very familiar to Canadians. Many have seen it already, and will not necessarily associate it with life insurance or with Empire Life.
Second, it reeks of greed on the part of Metro. They had a runaway hit for the public good, and they sell it to an insurance company who totally miss the point? Now all those cute death scenarios are there to scare people into buying something, rather than to make a point about rail safety.
Third, how lazy do you have to be, as a marketer, to buy a successful, globally-recognized safety campaign and just tack a tacky tagline and corporate logo on it? Yeesh.
Yes, I've seen those TBWA Paris ads that are an Art Director's wet dream. But this one from Heye Group, Munich, is more of a nightmare.
What is the message, really? That you should have fewer friends, so that you get to keep more fries? Just seeing those hands reach in like that kills my appetite anyway.
… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.
Conservative party chairman Grant Shapps has insisted he loves bingo and drinks beer after he faced a storm of criticism over a poster he tweeted following the UK budget this week.
Chancellor George Osborne gave the bingo industry a tax cut and took a penny off beer duty in the budget, prompting Shapps to tweet a poster reading ‘Bingo! Cutting the bingo tax and been duty – to help hard working people do more of the things they enjoy’.
Shapps encouraged followers to retweet him and spread the word – which they did, kicking off a storm in which users accused him of being condescending. He also faced criticism for using the term ‘they’.
Mr. Shapps has since defended his message, insisting, “personally, I drink beer and I love a game of bingo." The Guardian's Owen Jones called it "so patronising it looks like a crude attempt at satire."
Here are some of the better reactions on Twitter:
@double_dex I've never been more convinced something real was fake. Maybe it's some sort of genius we haven't worked out?
— daysofspeed (@daysofspeed) March 19, 2014
Sweet Jaysus, @grantshapps, why not just stick a picture up of a bloke with a flat cap, whippets and a fucking football ticket.
— Chris Nicholson (@EraseThisTweet) March 19, 2014
Ignore the fact that Epic Meal Time is based in Montreal, far out of Hardee's territory. This is the internet age. Their social media cred is well established in the USA.
“The Super Bacon Cheeseburger is a truly epic creation that celebrates all that is glorious about bacon,” said Brad Haley, chief marketing officer of CKE Restaurants. “Who better to help us advertise it than the stars of Epic Meal Time, Harley and Muscles Glasses, whose love for bacon is so extreme that it, at times, borders on inappropriate? Our target audience of young, hungry guys spends a lot of time watching videos on YouTube, and the Epic Meal Time channel is a favorite. In the new spot, fans of Epic Meal Time will even recognize Muscles Glasses’ trademark t-shirt with ‘Bacon Strips &’ repeated several times on the front. The spot does a perfect job getting across our message that the Super Bacon Cheeseburger has a lot of bacon on it or, as the ad states, ‘bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon.’”
The pieces were all in place for an awesomely viral campaign. Except somehow, they screwed it up.
Watch:
The amusingly censored profanity is there, but the ad completely lacks the manic delivery that Epic Meal Time consistently serves up. The agency, 72andSunny, couldn't help but be slaves to the conventions of fast food advertising: burger beauty shots and awkward fake eating. The result is an underwhelming campaign that diminishes both brands:
It could be the client's fault. But why would a company that has no problem using raunchy sex kittens to sell its product be so conservative when it comes to showing men? Why didn't they let Harley and Muscles Glasses create some kind of epic feast using the Super Bacon Cheeseburger as the key ingredient? The potential for something great was within reach, and yet everyone involved failed to grasp it:
Just goes to show that there is no substitute for authenticity.
Maple Leaf is currently pushing this video on Facebook ads. It tells the story of a woman who calmly accepts her role in the universe, which is that of a 1950s mom who is expected to do all the cooking and cleaning of the house. Plus, she has the added bonus that her husband is a selfish man-child who can't even be bothered to do "manly" chores like change lightbulbs (which is clearly far too sciencey for her pretty little head).
You might think that this lady would find relief by discovering that women are not required to be slaves/doormats to heir husbands and children anymore, and would woman up and take control of her life. But who needs feminism when you have bacon?
That's right, just feed delicious strips of salt, fat and nitrates to your husband and kids, three meals a day, and they will suddenly do your every bidding. Because apparently, none of them has figured out how to use a frying pan. Or a microwave. Or even a box of pre-cooked bacon:
Hey, I love bacon too. But this ad is stuck in another era, in which women were expected to manipulate "their" men by coddling them like children. And men were stupid oafs who were that easy to manipulate.
Via ecrater.com
Ah, the good old days! You see? Women have always had the power of pork.
That was the flyer those of us in the RoC ("Rest-of-Canada") got for last weekend's holiday sale. But if you live in Quebec, you got one of these:
National advertisers are often told that Canadian patriotism doesn't sell as well in Quebec, especially among those who see the province's founding European-descended population as a unique and separate nation. But the big electronics retailer may have failed to understand that this kind of anti-Canada strategy — especially on the one day when most Canadians are fiercely proud of themselves — tends to enrage federalists everywhere.
You can enjoy the PR meltdown on their Facebook page. Here are some highlights (that didn't involve anti-French trolling):
Danielle Jang, spokeswoman for Best Buy, gave this hilarious response to CBC News:
"Like every year, we feel it is important to recognize the Moving Day holiday in Quebec because it is a significant day in this market and it's the only place in Canada where this happens. We want to celebrate and recognize this as an important day."
Developing...
Tip via Consumerist (because I was too busy celebrating... errr... "Moving Day"... to keep up with the local news.)
The original poster, produced in 1943 by J. Howard Miller in 1943 for Westinghouse Electric as morale-booster for women workers, has since become an iconic image for female empowerment.
That is, until 70 years later, when Rosie was hijacked to sell cleaning supplies to women as part of the expectation that they're responsible for housework:
This image, which for the moment I can only find as a partial, was spotted and shared by Instagrammer Heather Beschizza (@hbeschizza), later picked up by Boing Boing and Buzzfeed.
My favourite comment in the ensuing cascading PR fail is from Dan Savage:
Ontario Conservative opposition leader Tim Hudak wants to redefine the job description for teachers, requiring them to spend time outside teaching hours doing extra meetings and paperwork (removing any right to work-to-rule) and changing the teacher payscale to punish those who do not "volunteer" for extracurricular activities. As the husband of a teacher (and a supporter of labour rights) I am against this. But what I'm here for is a lesson on unintended consequences in social media.
The Nepean-Carleton Progressive Conservative Riding Association have launched a petition, "Students Deserve Better," that aims to gather public support for their education platform, which will be a major issue in the upcoming election. The petition also had an invitation to send union leaders a message, which would be automatically displayed on the site. The hope was, I assume, to show a public outcry against "union bosses" (democratically elected by teachers) telling teachers to work to rule (which they had voted to do by an overwhelming majority).
The message almost immediately got hijacked by teachers:
By noon today, the comments column was completely dominated by pro-union comments like that above. Dozens of them. By 12:40, the administrator had removed the comments as well as the e-mail messaging form.
(I wish I had collected more of them before my last refresh — let me know if you have screencaps!)
The petition itself is a bit of a mess now. It doesn't even tell you how many have signed. But the easy takeover of its message, through an effort coordinated by pro-teacher social media, is a lesson some nameless political social media "guru" will not soon forget.
Buzzfeed reports that a laid-off British employee of HMV sent real-time updates to the company's Twitter account as they were being fired. Here are some choice ones:
The tweets have been since been deleted and replaced with this:
I would apologise for the #hmvXFactorFiring tweets but I felt like someone had to speak. As someone without a family to support/no mortgage.
I felt that I was the safest person to do so. Not to mention, I wanted to show the power of Social Media to those who refused to be educated
Just to set something straight, I did not ‘hijack’ the hmv twitter account. I actually assumed sole responsibility of Twitter & Facebook -
- over two years ago, as an intern. When asked (this afternoon), I gladly provided the password to head office. I also set another member of
staff up as a manager on Facebook, and removed myself from the admin list. I didn’t resist any requests to cooperate.
Since my internship started, I worked tirelessly to educate the business of the importance of Social Media – not as a short-term commercial
tool, but as a tool to build and strengthen the customer relationship, and to gain invaluable real-time feedback from the consumers that
have kept us going for over 91 years. While many colleagues understood and supported this, it was the more senior members of staff who
never seemed to grasp its importance.
I hoped that today's actions would finally show them the true power and importance of Social Media, and I hope they're finally listening.
Now, I should probably go and hide for a while...Thank you so much for your supportive tweets! Much love to the hmv staff & customers
There's a big lesson to be learned there, but unfortunately she's limited her career by attempting to teach it to people who probably aren't listening.
Via Buzzfeed comes Page 5 of The Stamford Advocate, in which a gun show ad appears next to a story about Sandy Hook Elementary School reopening after last year's horrible shooting rampage that killed 20 children and 6 adults.
These mistakes happen, and nobody would dare suggest that anyone in the community would purposely place this ad right there. It's more of an issue of quality control, or rather lack of it, in today's mainstream media.
But accidental or not, I was just served up this ad by the homepage of the online edition:
The ad is actually for an arts exhibition. But once again, a chilling combination of images.
