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Loading ...by Jonathan Trenn
It could have been a great marketing ploy. It could have be fun. Heck, it would have been a great case study to blog about.
Instead it was a completely fake. Crap.
If you’re involved in advertising then you know about the AMC show Mad Men, which directly takes you into the fictitious Madison Avenue ad agency Sterling Cooper. Based in 1962, it’s gives us slew of stereotyped characters that meld well together. You can smell hte cigar smoke and cologne just watching it.
Recently its main characters began showing up on Twitter. They’d follow you. You’d follow them. You could exchange tweets with them. Yesterday I asked Betty Draper, the wife of main character and agency creative director and philanderer Don Draper:
@betty_draper Why that sad look on your face? You’re much to pretty to have that frown.
to which she replied:
betty_draper @jptrenn Oh, it’s nothing, really. Just that Bobby broke something again, and it’s not even noon yet! I swear that boy has too much energy.
Soon afterwards I got this from Bobbie_Barrett, a who’s as lustful as Don:
Bobbie_Barrett @jptrenn can @betty_draper really be that naive? No wonder @don_draper spends late nights at the office.
So I responded to Bobbie:
@Bobbie_Barrett Betty is smiling now. Don’t know what to make of it. Perhaps Don came home early. For once. But there’s always tomorrow.
Turns out the cast of characters popping up on Twitter aren’t from AMC or the show. They don’t have any ties at all. So AMC approached Twitter to have them taken down.
That sucks. I can understand why AMC did it. Bobbie Barrett’s profile linked to Don’t Fuck With Me Fellas. That was a dumb thing to link to.
The blown opportunity is not from the take down. It’s from not doing it in the first place. AMC or whomever behind the show could have created these characters themselved, created a agency website and run with it. There could have been some sort of notification that they were fictional, but it would have been great to play along with them. And it would have been used as a continual promotional vehicle for the show.
It would have been great if AMC first tried, via Twitter, to locate the people behind this, vet them, and then see if it was cool to let them run with it. Alas, lawyers.
Hopefully, we’ll see a rebirth. Real soon.
Filed under: Advertising, Controversial Marketing, Twitter
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It was all great fun till someone got slapped with a take-down notice…
And you’re right that it would have been great if AMC embraced the fans who were doing this. They kept in character quite well, and it could have opened up a whole slew of new marketing opportunities for AMC, not to mention continued cultivation of a highly enthusiastic fan base. I’d hazard a guess that AMC has no idea how many people talk about Mad Men on Twitter on a regular basis, nor how those fans feel about the show.
Missed opportunities all over the place!
AMC should have just played ignorant. Should have just let it go and try to bring the Twitterers into the folks.
Jonathan, what is your take on Personal Twittering/blogging here?
I think AMC was legally justified here, but strategically they made a mistake. They own the brand - the show that is - and the shows characters.
I think they should have contacted the people behind the characters and basically said “Look, we want to work with you because we see potential in this. But we have to vet you on some things to make sure you’re not a whacko or something”.
Then they could arrange some sort of legal arrangement whereas the character could be reclaimed if the person behind it started using it inappropriately. The people behind the characters could get a stipend and even a free trip to meet the characters.
Companies have to protect their brands, but they can engage those that want to enhance it online.
As far as taking over a character, I’d say that we all have to be careful - I’ve been a victim of identity theft - and it sucks.
If an agency creates one for a client…that can get tricky. Twitter is very personal and relationships build. If you’re doing it for a client, then it’s best to just use it as a notification platform like @BarackObama.
I can see disasters happening where a “friend” or “follower” ends up meeting a person and thinks that the celeb type person will know them. So the client must be kept appraised of what’s going on and perhaps should be a part of it.
It’s still an ethical question, but it’s also more procedural.
What these people did with Mad Men was fine. Sure, they got caught. But it seems they had good motives. The characters themselves were fictitious, so it wasn’t as if there was someone out there being impersonated.
One point. About vetting. Necessary. It could be like someone impersonating a cop. Or the person involved could be someone undesirable in some way. Have some sort of police record. But AMC should have given these folks a try.
The trick that AMC should have done was create other characters that took over:
Pete Campbell could have taken over along with Don Draper actually flirting with the fine ladies on twitter.
Plus given that Joan Holloway and Roger Sterling could have taken over– and driven out the other characters while having Twitter remove them from behind the scenes and plant new ones in their place
there is so much that could be done
Hmmm Dexter and CSI Miami are often filmed in my city.. wonder if I should hit their PR about a campaign about the next season of Dexter ..Lila showing up from Paris to reach out to dexter and maybe the kids with Dexter’s girlfriend would have been a good addition
However Jonathan’s suggestion to AMC and vetting out the person is correct. As a fellow id theft victim, it ain’t pretty and a lot of work.
But the legal department and marketing could have partnered up with Twitter to get these characters to cooperate. would have been HUGE for Twitter who also dropped the ball in not presenting AMC with the proverbial goose that laid the golden egg for both sides