Motrin

Quotes for the week ending 29 November, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“The impending total collapse of the dollar will render the true value of the average savings account or investment portfolio roughly equal to a bucket of warm piss.”

Thomas J. Wurtz, CFO of Wachovia, quoted in a press release about a new, daring billboard ad campaign

“If wearing your baby hurts your back or neck, you need positioning help, not Motrin”

Josh Bernoff, on the huge headache –um, backlash–Johnson & Johnson got on account of the ad about ‘wearing your baby’ in a sling.”

“Let’s face it: your beautifully lit, ideally scouted, model-perfect spot is likely going to be consumed in a 320×240 window. In that environment, Martin Scorsese would have a difficult time distinguishing between something shot on a Panavision Genesis versus a $150 Flip.”

Lewis Rothkopf, on the need to leverage broadband to narrowcast and target messaging in the way broadcasting has never done.

“Cheer up, it could be worse: it could be flu we’re facing and not merely a once in a 100 year meltdown in the financial system.”

Comment about a six-part drama, Survivors, on BBC1 where the story involves 90% of the population being wiped out in a flu pandemic.

“You get 14-year-old boys yelling out `I love you!’ because they learn these English expressions and try to use them.”

Kathleen Hampton, a teacher, using Skype to teach English to students in Korea in a reverse-outsourcing business from a town in Wyoming with a population of just 350.

“It’s not that we now have a president who’s black. It’s that for the first time we have a president who’s actually green.”

Oakland, Ca-based green-collar evangelist, Van Jones at GreenBuild conference this week.

“It’s a terrorist strike. Not entertainment. So tweeters, please be responsible with your tweets.”

A Twitter messge from Mumbai from primaveron@mumbai as the awful terrorist attack on the city broke out. Bloggers and the media took to new media to report the standoff and rescue operation

YouTube mashups as attack weapon

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Johnson & Johnson learned the painful way how a social media could be used against you. See previous post and the YouTube video by angry Motrin mom.

This is not exactly a new approach. It was only last November that someone called out Unilever on it’s Axe positioning,  mashing up the brilliant Dove commercial about ‘real beauty’ and the same company’s sex-ridden ads for Axe —below.

These videos tell a different kind of story. The Motrin video is vary basic, the anti-Axe quite slick. Yet they achieve a few important things:

  • They assemble and summarize supporting evidence against the offending brand
  • They make the problem seem big enough to recruit new supporters of the cause
  • They provoke the marketer to react

To think, not too long ago, the only tool at one’s disposal when offended, was a letter to the editor of your local paper!

Motrin’s ad brouhaha: is social media nasty medicine?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Motrin’s baby-as-fashion accessory ad that created a lot of comment among moms in the blogosphere, also created a teaching moment about how social media can be used to monitor, respond and even prevent such a brouhaha.

Thousand of tweets, articles, and angry blog posts later, we need to step back and ask ourselves: how could a marketer learn form this.  AdAge has great analysis of this story with respect to the social media backlash.

First some background: About six months ago, Dunkin Donuts responded to a similar attack (by Michelle Malkin) about an ad that purportedly used a ‘terrorist’ icon, a kaffiyeh. The attack was without any substance, by the marketer took the ad down, fearing the negative chatter in the blogosphere would damage its brand.

Motrin’s parent company, Johnson & Johnson, no stranger to controversy, issued a statement apologizing missing the mark.  I don’t think it needed to have gone there, and could have done better damage control by engaging those they had offended. But hindsight is 20-20 in a crisis, and maybe they did not know how to engage the groups via social media.

Which brings us to pre-emptive public relations, and the ability to use new media to listen first. Without that, social media seems like a btter pill to swallow, because it all seems like a noisy echo-chamber waiting to take you out.