By Andreas Duess, Connection Architect
In recent weeks we’ve been seeing a number of instances where old marketing thinking has been applied to the new marketing universe, with results as humorous as they are disastrous.
My favourite of these belly flops is a campaign for Okanagan winery Sumac Ridge. Their ad agency sold them on a campaign that involved posting photocopied posters with a home made look to lamp posts, claiming the owner had lost his precious personal diary.
Above a roughly drawn sketch of a journal it said: “Lost. My personal diary and my constant companion. It’s a little collection of all my gems of wisdom from the past year.” At the bottom a note asked anyone who found it to tweet its owner, David Wicken.
When, several days later, all around downtown Vancouver people started finding what looked like the journal in question – wedged between parking meters, on walls, behind a hedge – most thought that they had stumbled across the lost book and were eager to return it to its rightful owner. To their dismay all of them found out that what they had just found was just one of 2000 copies of a mass produced booklet, featuring a marketing message from Sumac Ridge. Not even David Wicken, who had been presented as an assistant winemaker on his twitter account, was real.
What happened here is that old marketing thinking got to play with the shiny new toys of social media and promptly got the context all wrong. If you’ve ever watched “The Nightmare before Christmas”, a wonderfully quirky Tim Burton movie where The King of Halloween takes over the Christmas holidays, you’ve got a good idea of where this is heading – disappointment and anger, served with a side of comedy and ridicule.
People felt cheated, people felt taken advantage of, and rightly so. The campaign appealed to our sense of compassion and altruism, our willingness to help a stranger without material reward. It took advantage of our good nature for its own purposes, violating the trust we put into each other, the very trust that makes our communities work.
Events and campaigns like the Sumac Ridge effort “percolate down into the very framework of day-to-day interaction, and day-to-day experience,” says Bernard McGrane, an associate professor of sociology at Chapman University in southern California, “We’ve become hair triggers with cynicism and skepticism.”
Instead of trying to figure out how to connect with customers in a genuine way, which should be the holy grail of social media, the agency responsible went out of their way to interrupt the lives of the intended audience, the way a TV commercial or magazine ad does.
So how did people react? To quote Hannah Stringer, who found one the books: “That’s so uncool”. And although she is a wine drinker, she added that from now on she’ll be going out of her way to avoid purchasing Sumac Ridge products.
