Some minor issues

Question 3 in Philippe’s FAQ: “Are there examples of 2.0 initiatives made by traditional brands that went totally out of hand?”

Why is this such a hard question? Because it’s the only one in the questionnaire that’s intrinsic negative! If somebody explains you new marketing, and your response is “are there examples of thing that went wrong”, you’re not really listening. You don’t seem to give it a chance.

But it would be too easy not answering the question, so I give it a shot as well. After all, we can also learn from failures I want to repeat what I said to Philippe in the comments of the previous question: remember tradition advertising go wrong as well. There are indeed a lot of traditional campaigns that went out of hand, or don’t seem to reach the aimed result. Bad campaigns happen, anyway, anywhere. It’s not about the medium.

BTW: you can/should read Philippe’s answer to the question on his blog.

Like Philippe I was also thinking about the Chevy Tahoe campaign. In short, to promote the Tahoe SUV, Chevrolet started a campaign where users were able to create their own clips. They could use footage provided on the campaign site, and use their own words to accompany the images. It didn’t take long before critics started to abuse this campaign to embed environmental messages in their homebrewed ads. Most people probably know SUV’s are heavy polluters, so in this case they were an easy target. You can still find a list on youTube.
What can we learn? In this case it’s clear the product does have enemies. They knew this on forehand. In such a case you have to be extra careful. Does this mean you shouldn’t open dialogue? Of course you should. But the Tahoe case was not about conversation. It was about brand advocacy that wasn’t there. Chevrolet wanted people to recommend their brand, but it wasn’t about the product, it was about the campaign itself.

A second example I wanted to point out is the fake Wallmart blog about half a year ago. It was about some people in a van, who spend the night on Wallmart parking lots. It turned out to be a campaign from Wallmart’s PR agency, Edelman, which was a big shock itself. Edelman is in the industry known as one of the leading agencies on new marketing. The damage in this case was totally for the agency, and not for the client. They had no choice than excuse themselves publicly as you can read on the CEO’s blog.
Wallmart, or Edelman, failed to be transparent. Failed to be authentic, and this backfired. I’m sure they won’t fail on these points in the future.

A third thing I wanted to point out is the malfunctioning of new marketing campaigns. A little explanation. Brands are amazed by the successes of certain social things happening on the internet. They want to have the same successes, with their own brand of course. They figure out it’s a cheap and easy way of advertising, because since the buzz is the media, the media will be almost free. They want to ride the viral wave, to give it a name. So they try to do some funny stuff, and hope it will be picked up. From a personal experience however, I know some brands can’t/won’t let go. They won’t do what it takes to have true viral potential, because they want to control their brand. By definition, if you let the community take over, you lose control. And they are afraid of this. This results in weak viral concepts, almost hardly reaching full potential. Since there is no media, there is no traffic, the viral chain fails and the campaign fails as well.
Lessons here: know who you want to reach. Do you want to go viral: please do, but go the full monty. You want a more traditional, less confronting campaign, no problem as well. But if you don’t buy media, you won’t have reach, and your campaign fails again.