Very few people who work in the ad industry have the balls to question the ethics of a campaign -- ethics, in advertising? -- because doing so could burn a bridge from a potential client. But what the hell -- we're not here to play nice, we're here to advise our clients about what works, and that includes not making mistakes that damage their future reputation.
So let's take a look at, oh, perhaps Chevy's current SXSW campaign. Say hypothetically you're a car company trying to boost sales among a younger demographic, and the MRI data shows these people are avoiding TV and spending more time in social media listening to peers. It's really hard to buy advertising against that demo. And then your agency guru walks in wearing a black T-shirt talking about SIM scores suggesting there's a way to "earn media" -- and NOT pay for it -- by letting a handful of young people borrow cars and drive to an uberhip conference, say SXSW Interactive in Texas, and broadcast their Chevy adventures along the way. And they'll use a "hashtag," something like #chevysxsw, that appears at the end of every tweet. A handful of cars, a dozen people times their few thousand followers, and suddenly you have an organic loudspeaker spraying Chevy messages to hundreds of thousands of people inside Twitter every day ... for almost no marketing budget.
Is this a good idea? Does it help the Chevy brand? Do the thousands of people exposed to non sequitur messaging and strange #chevyreadthis symbols like the promotions creeping into their communication stream, and then think, heck, it's high time to test drive a Chevy? And what about the broader ecosystem issues of what happens if such campaigns take off, and one day every other tweet from your own personal online community has a #brandmention attached because someone is getting a little free gift from a car or stereo or condom company? What happens to the value of the network then?
Is anyone thinking about the adverse impact of the people annoyed by messaging vs. the people who respond?
We've seen this before in the 1990s with telemarketing. For you young readers out there, telesales actually used to be a part of most business operations and worked well ... until the aggregate calls got to be too much. Do Not Call lists were created, most Americans signed up, the government imposed heavy fines for any marketer who didn't avoid calling DNC homes, and suddenly shilling via phone did not work anymore. You'll still get calls from politicians or nonprofits who are exempt from DNC (love that, don't you?), but even they have challenges making telemarketing work, because the only people who respond tend to be the less educated, less wealthy, less desirable consumers who haven't figured out how to sign up for DNC.
The Scobleizer's take on ethics
About a year ago we had the fortune to interview Robert Scoble for a BusinessWeek column, and he said something very smart. We paraphrase: Rules in business about conflicts of interest or partitioning advertising, he said, were not invented because businesses are run by altruists. The rules evolved because businesses screwed up, overstepped their bounds, lost customers, and realized they needed rules to keep operations in order. Advertising works best when it is kept in its box and labeled as such, because people know where it is coming from. Letting it creep into the stream makes the source hazy, adds a layer of confusion, and diminishes the value of the network.
So, dear #chevytweeters on Twitter and the ad agencies who promote such hoopla. We hope your campaign is a rousing success. We're sure your social-media sentiment score will click up this week, and the metrics will look great in PowerPoint. But are you really thinking about the direction your car is headed?
Chevy campaign details here.
7 comments:
Oh my god that is horrible. Thank god I've been unfollowing ppl. The LEAST they could do is be interesting!
While there's no doubt that the campaign may be a bit derivative of another campaign that shall remain nameless, I fail to catch the gist of your gripe. As long as the tweeters are not being coached into specific messages and just having fun and giving their honest impressions of their road trip experience, how is this offensive? Or to restate, how is it any more offensive than that other "nameless" campaign that we all love to talk about?
To my eye, the campaign seems to be at the very least following best practices. The activities seem a bit frivolous, but not egregious. And the activities seems all in good fun.
Now it we're judging this based on whether this is a good idea and, to Tyler's point, whether these posts are interesting, then I agree that this all seems a bit annoying to me. But you're leveling some pretty tough ethical charges about them using the medium of Twitter inappropriately and I just don't see it.
I respectfully disagree. But don't worry, I still want to grow up and be just like you, Ben Kunz.
Bob Knorpp
Host of The BeanCast
Posts every Monday @ http://beancast.us
Thanks, Bob. I merely suggest that giving people an incentive to insert your *brand* into their daily personal conversations is a bit of a low point in marketing's history. We have finally made the mind media placement.
I find that a bit inauthentic, a sign that the *brand* cannot find real ways to be relevant, and frankly a bit sad.
It's also a way to break trust. If you get a personal incentive to talk about a brand, you're not really talking about the brand because you love it -- but because you're getting cash or a gift or a loan or a joyride. You're saying "this is good for you" when you're really thinking "this is good for me." You're putting your self-interest ahead of mine. You're taking more than you give.
Not the basis for what Mr. Brogan calls "Trust Agents," eh?
I understand your concerns but it's the same with all media, social or otherwise. As marketeers we're our own worst enemies. We take channels that prove popular then kill them by saturating them with client messages. It's happened on TV, radio, email and now Twitter. I think it was Scoble who spoke about the 4 stages of technology – 1) the technologists create it 2) the technologists improve it 3) the artists start using it 4) business gets hold of it. And by stage 4 it's dead – and Twitter's in stage 4. Don't know what the solution is however!
Chris, thanks for stopping by.
I understand marketers must push to get messages out in any medium (of course, working in advertising). And the over-saturation happens everywhere; Clear Channel recently had to launch a "less is more" campaign to marketers after it realized running too many radio spots per hour was killing its ratings.
It's a challenging balance. In social media, I think brands are better off creating real news/buzz that people talk about vs. buying or staging their way in. Of course that is extremely difficult, and I have no easy answers.
Thanks, and I'll check out the Volt if it's in Austin.
Sorry...way late to this party. As a participant in the Chevy SXSW promo, why not toss in my two cents.
I certainly understand where you're coming from. I think as marketers, we can do a service by trying our damn-nest to get as many as possible out of the "impression" metric.
But as long as PR jugernauts are helping to steer big brands in the social space, I fear we may all doomed.
I think a better focus would be on high quality content, that lasts and builds views over time. However, when you have a PR company offering the same impressions as a national television campaign for 15% of the cost...big brands bite.
(For what it's worth, we were by far not the worst offenders, our team got smoked because of our lack of hashtag tweets*)
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