When marketing campaigns go wrong
by Julian Gratton
So imagine this. You’ve been tasked by a major TV Network to promote an animated series with a guerrilla marketing campaign. Your idea is a winner, and involves you sending some electronic devices (that resemble a character from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force) to several major cities so that some hired help can place them in places that have a high footfall.
Then you wake up on the morning of day one of your campaign to hear that a member of the public has spotted one of your devices and thought it weird enough to report it to the police. The police then call the bomb squad asking for help in identifying a device. They then shut down part of a major highway and the public transportation system while they disable what they think is a bomb with a smaller explosive filled with water.
It gets worse!
Boston Police then received another call identifying a similar device that was found under a couple of bridges. As a precaution, the police closed both bridges and the coast guard also closed the river. It wasn’t until about 3pm that day that the police were informed it was a publicity stunt. By this time the news had gone national thanks to the multitude of TV trucks and helicopters covering the incident.
The fallout of this was that Interference Inc. (the agency who created the campaign) and Turner Broadcasting Systems agreed to pay out $2 million in compensation. There were further repercussions that you can read about here… but despite all the fines and arrests made, Peter Shankman author of ‘Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work – And Why We Need Them’, summed it beautifully when he said:
“They just got $50 million of PR for $750,000, and they did a great, great job.”
Just for feet and the disastrous Super Bowl advert
Back in 1999 the US shoe retailer Just For Feet hired Saatchi & Saatchi to create an advert that it ran in the commercial break of Super Bowl XXXIII. A 30 second spot at this time cost advertisers $1.6 million and before the advert ran, Just For Feet’s share price was $16.
In the advert, embedded below, a white Humvee full of white men tracks a Kenyan runner. The men offer the runner a cup of water spiked with a sedative; the runner collapses, and the men force a pair of Nike trainers onto his feet. The runner wakes up, notices that he now has sneakers on his feet, screams, and runs away, attempting to shake the shoes off. I kid you not… this is the idea that ran, take a look below.
It is predicted that the advert was seen by 175 million people in the US and the next day was described as “Appallingly insensitive,” by The New York Times and “neo-colonialist … culturally imperialist, and probably racist” by the trade magazine Advertising Age. The Des Moine Register even said the company should be renamed “Just for Racists”.
As a result of the advert Just For Feet’s sales tumbled and their share price fell to $6 prompting Just For Feet to launch a $10 million lawsuit against Saatchi & Saatchi. Their case was based on the fact that Harold Ruttenberg, Just for Feet’s chief executive, claimed that Saatchi & Saatchi creatives browbeat him into using the advert despite his declared misgivings: “What we wanted was a fun sort of advertisement,” he said.
Just For Feet eventually dropped the lawsuit and in November 1999, Just For Feet filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection… luckily for Saatchi & Saatchi’s reputation it was not down to their advert… but accountancy fraud.
The fallout from the Just For Feet advert, however, prompted Chuck McBride (Creative Director of Wieden, Kennedy) to say: “It’s hard to come up with something truly great unless it walks that precarious line of, `Oh no, is it really horrible?’ I would feel gun-shy if I knew that every time I did something really horrible, I’d end up in court.”
We all make mistakes
I’m sure if you work in marketing or advertising you have your own stories of things going wrong. I know I do! What I’m trying to do by highlighting the two campaigns above is to make you feel better about any mistake that may happen… because even with the best intentions sometimes things are just out of your control.
Just ask anyone at Ogilvy & Mather who worked on the high profile $200 million ‘Beyond Petroleum’ public relations campaign for BP. How were they supposed to know that, not long after launching the campaign, a refinery was going to blow up in Texas. And that figures would reveal that BP was investing billions in buying other oil companies but only millions in researching and developing alternative fuels.
Or the good people who created an advertising campaign for Strand cigarettes with the strapline ‘You’re never alone with a Strand’. The omens for the advert were good. It was written by John May, was popular with the public, with Terrence Brooks (the smoking man) becoming a star and the music reaching Number 39 in the singles chart. However, sales of the brand were poor and it was soon taken off the market. The public associated smoking Strand cigarettes with being lonely and was put off from buying them. The advert is now regarded as the most disastrous cigarette advert ever aired.
So when your next print job goes wrong or you miss a spelling mistake. Or maybe you don’t get a great response rate, just remember the campaigns above. In fact just remember the BP case study and say to yourself this well-known phrase:
Worse things happen at sea!
If you’d like to have an effective marketing campaign created for you… why not give Red C a call on 0161 872 1361 or click here
Tags: Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Beyond Petroleum, Boston Police, Chuck McBride, Digital Agency, Direct Marketing Agency, Guerilla Marketing, Interference Inc., Just For Feet, Kennedy, Manchester Advertising Agency, Manchester Marketing Agency, Marketing Agency, Marketing Campaign, Ogilvy & Mather, Peter Shankman, Saatchi & Saatchi, SEO Company, Super Bowl XXXIII, Turner Broadcasting Systems, Wieden
