Earlier this year Grey Germany put out three condom ads for Doc Morris pharmacies. They were attempts to wittily imply that the human race could have been spared three uber-butchers of the past century (Mao Tze-Tung, Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden), and the horror and suffering they brought, by a simple condom (a Doc Morris condom, natch). The humble rubber as a superhero and savior of humanity — there definitely is potential for some wonderful, dark, absurdist humor in that idea.

I can totally see how a certain young, urbane sector of German society could find these ads really quite funny and compelling — as they did the suicide-themed Pepsi One ads done last year that offended so many outside the target demographic.

Now, unfortunately for Grey and for Doc Morris, not everyone thought the “Evil Sperm” ads were funny. Quite a few people thought they were racist, insensitive, offensive and inappropriate — and now those adjectives are associated with Doc Morris pharmacies in people’s heads.

That’s the way it is with humor — sometimes you nail it, sometimes you bomb. Humor is powerful in both directions.

A simple allegory for old-media folks who still don’t get it: Standing up and telling a fart joke while drinking with friends in your rec room = low risk. Standing up and telling a fart joke while drinking with friends at someone’s wedding party = high risk.

With internet advertising and PR, you are always at someone’s wedding party; you are never safely behind closed doors. If you try to be loud and draw attention to yourself, as advertisers and PR folk generally do, the people at the next table are going to hear it — and if you’re testing the limits of good taste with your humor, the odds are that those uptight grandmas and squares and stuffed shirts who just don’t appreciate your super-edgy wit are going to think poorly of you and perhaps even whack you with their cash-filled Vera Bradley handbags.

Here are some realities of the media world of 2009 that old-school advertising and PR would be well served to note:

• You can’t expect your messaging to stay contained within your target demographic. The information you put out will spread, and that spread is beyond your control. There are only two reasons why information doesn’t spread once it is out: a) people are just uninterested in your message, b) it’s in a language people don’t speak (which is really just a subset of “a,” frankly). Note: Images like the “Evil Sperm” ads are language-less, so they will jump the language barrier with glee.
• You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. There is no memory hole with the internet. Book-burning is so 20th century. Babelsplatz was yesterday. If you put it out, it is there to stay (even if folks like Ads of the World are willing to censor).
• Hiding and praying it will go away rarely works. Like every good stand-up comic knows, if your routine is bombing, the only thing you can do is keep talking. It’s double or nothing. The only treatment for unfortunate speech is more speech.

So, what does this mean concretely? How does the modern PR/advertising flack deal with the fact that we live in a world where toothpaste gets irretrievably out of the tube and will probably ooze into places we never wanted to have it? Well …

• Craft your message with the knowledge that it will likely go where you didn’t intend it to go. One thing this could mean is don’t do messages that, while they may resonate with one of your customer demographics, are bound to offend others. Grey’s “Evil Sperm” and Pepsi’s suicide ads fall into that category. Alternately, if you can’t resist putting out offensive stuff, because it’s just so incredibly funny and will make your targets buy and your colleagues green with professional envy, then have your mea culpa marketing strategy ready in advance to take advantage of the probable result — a social-media shitstorm — as Pepsi did with its suicide ads (more on mea culpa marketing below).
• Don’t humiliate yourself by begging (or worse, demanding) bloggers to go back and censor your screw-up. As a blogger, I say deleting posts is cool only in the rarest of circumstances — generally only when an innocent individual will be hurt or put in danger by the information — never when it’s just embarrassing to a company. Trying to get bloggers to censor information is just going to offend them further, make them question your ethics and increase the chance that they will react to you with animosity.
• Have your mea culpa machine ready to roll. If you offend with your communications, keep communicating — your best hope is to dilute your screw-up with evidence that you really are upstanding folks who made a little mistake. If you are really good at this, you can jujitsu the negative into positive and come out well ahead, with free positive publicity and goodwill among influencers and your target markets. How do you do this?
  1. 1. Listen to those criticizing you and understand how you offended — this means tracking all negative mentions and understanding their gripes.
     2. Figure out what you are sorry for, what you are not sorry for and prepare your response accordingly. Be honest. Don’t be arrogant, though — if you’re not sorry enough, or for the stuff you should be, it’s likely the social-media sphere will make you truly sorry if you screw up your apology as well.
     3. Connect with your detractors personally and as a real human being. This means actually reading their posts about you; figuring out who they are and what their perspective and values are; and engaging them on their terms, in their language and with a convincing apology — and above all, as a living, breathing, fellow human being, not as a faceless corporation or as a smooth-talking, snakeskin-suit PR wanker.
     4. Connect publicly with your detractors’ negative coverage of you. Comment on the relevant articles where appropriate, write your own articles on the subject if appropriate, guest blog a response/apology on a detractor’s site where appropriate. Be smart though. Screw this part up, and you may just fan the flames high again, rather than douse them with the cooling water of an effective mea culpa.
     5. Maintain the relationships going forward. Now that you’ve invested the energy into converting a detractor into a friend, or at least a “tolerater,” maintain that relationship with communication — share information, ask guidance, get feedback. These former detractors can save you from future screw-ups, or at least are likely to deal with you a bit more sympathetically the next time you blow it.

In essence, it’s quite simple, just remember these three things: On the internet, you are always talking to the whole world, whether you intend to or not; be cognizant of who your message will offend and decide deliberately if you are willing to offend them; and if you must offend, have your mea culpa machine ready to go before you pull the trigger.

This is the media world of 2009 — it’s simple transparency and good human relations. There’s really no excuse for blowing it. (Via AdAge)

My dad, Bob Abraham, was an Ad Man at BBDO in the 60s, then he moved into photography in the 70s before evolving into multi-projector slide shows and multimedia production after we moved to Honolulu, Hawaii.

Back in the 80s, the bottom went out on tourism as the Japanese bailed Hawaii and so did many US tourists. Anyway, the first thing my dad’s clients did was cut promotion, cut ad and creative budgets — generally cut off their nose to spite their face.

Well, twenty-years later, I am experiencing the same thing, as a purveyor of digital PR. Alas, this is an historical problem, as Derrick Daye reaffirmed in his post, Recession Marketing Success Requires Boldness.

All Ad Men, PR Pros, Media Buyers, and Marketers know that this is the perfect time to get an advantage over your rivals because everyone is decimating their marketing, PR, and ad budgets and going “dark,” leaving many of the best ad placements available and at prices you could never imaging circa 2005.

The long-story short is that “during and after the recessions of 1949, 1954, 1958 and 1961, they found that almost without exception sales and profits dropped off at companies that cut back on advertising” and “studies also revealed that after the recessions ended, those companies continued to lag behind the ones that had maintained their advertising budgets.”

Here’s a longer excerpt from Recession Marketing Success Requires Boldness for you to check out:

Over the years hundreds of studies have been conducted to prove companies should maintain advertising during a recession. In the 1920’s advertising executive Roland S. Vaile tracked 200 companies through the recession of 1923. He reported in the April 1927 issue of the Harvard Business Review that the biggest sales increases throughout the period were rung up by companies that advertised the most. After World War II, Buchen Advertising, Inc. decided to plot the sales of a large number of advertisers through successive recessions. In 1947, it began measuring the annual advertising expenditures of each company. When they correlated the figures with sales and profit trends before, during and after the recessions of 1949, 1954, 1958 and 1961, they found that almost without exception sales and profits dropped off at companies that cut back on advertising.

Their studies also revealed that after the recessions ended, those companies continued to lag behind the ones that had maintained their advertising budgets. In 1979 another study by ABP/Meldrum & Fewsmith, covering the recession of 1974-75 and post-recession years, showed similar findings. They found that “companies which did not cut advertising expenditures during the recession years (1974-1975), experienced higher sales and net income during those two years and the two years following than companies which cut ad budgets in either or both recession years.”

Does the above advertisement ring of eugenics?  I am fascinated by the obsession that this nation — and Great Britain and Europe — had with “discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits” during the late 1800s through to World War II, when it disappeared for obvious reasons (see above).  In fact, when it comes to eugenics, America has a very dark secret.  We Americans, anyway, have an obsession with better, smarter, and stronger.

I hate eugenics and I don’t think it is funny.

There is enough threat of breeding ourselves like Race Horses already through partner-selection and so forth, that I really don’t find the implication of this ad campaign at all.

I have been seeing this all over my news feed but thanks to AdFreak for finally saying something smart on the subject, Use a condom, thwart that evil Hitler sperm:

Do condom ads reflect the mind-sets of nations? In the U.S., we get faux-patriotism and soft-core porn, while the French have safe sex on the beach. Now, from Germany, comes a dour dose of angst via Grey in a campaign for Doc Morris Pharmacies. The message: Use a condom, and be sure you’re not bringing the next Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler or Mao Zedong into the world. Of course, you’d have to sleep with one of those three to risk that—and I imagine most would abstain, especially in the case of Hitler, since he’s been dead for almost 65 years. Or maybe the ads are just generally likening sperm to invaders and terrorists. The bad hairdos should be enough to frighten anyone away. Via Ads of the World.

I am the newest blogger over at the AdAge Global Idea Network, a gig that only started a couple weeks ago. I love it. My editor is Matt Creamer. Matt and I rushed this post last night. I received the email three hours ago, IMed Matt, and we got it out now. I love blogging for this. I hope you enjoy this new post, Pepsi Apologized to Me For Its Suicide Ads:

Pepsi Apologized to Me For Its Suicide Ads
A close-up look at how the marketer is handling fallout from its controversial German ads

This week, PepsiCo got into hot water with more than a few folks after some suicide-themed ads many found offensive were brought to light. Here’s how they’re using social media to apologize to consumers—including me.

I received an email from B. Bonin Bough of PepsiCo, @boughb on Twitter, responding to my tweet about the recent post that Matt Creamer wrote a couple days ago, “Pepsi Opens a Vein of Controversy With New Suicide-Themed Ads”, about some ads that were run here in Germany in a lifestyle mag—ads Pepsi says it won’t run again after they received heavy criticism all over the web.

I’ll excerpt the first part of the email from Mr. Bough, who holds the title of director-social and emerging media and is based at Pepsi’s Purchase, N.Y. campus:

I saw your tweet and I just wanted to make sure I responded personally. We agree this creative is totally inappropriate; we apologize and please know it won’t run again. Also, thanks for the feedback and the Digg, it is important to discuss these types of issues.

My best friend committed suicide and this is a topic very close to my heart. So again I offer my deepest apologies.

Feel free to follow-up via twitter to me – @boughb or Huw – @huwgilbert or respond to this email.

Thanks, Bonin

I know you all think I am going to mock Bonin, but I won’t. I think this was a very bold and risky maneuver and worthy of praise rather than a tarring and feathering. And his outreach to me, a nobody, was accomplished within two days. When I replied to Bonin, asking if I might be allowed to post his email, he replied back that I could post his email but to try to “treat it kindly.” I hope I am.

I don’t think that Bonin knew that I blog for AdAge or that I know a bit about how the marketer is surprised about how well-traveled the ads have been. The old we-didn’t-think-anyone-here-would-see-it approach. Well, that’s the Internet for you. Someone passed along the scans of the PepsiMax ad, “One is a Very Very Lonely Calorie,” to the alert gang here at AdAge.

Within two days of tweeting, I received a note from @tweetmeme, a sure sign that my tweet had gone memetic (and that I had played at least a bit part in the mad traffic to the AdAge post as well as the resulting 40 comments.)

Here’s how fast and furious social media works. The article was posted on AdAge at 4:36 PM EST on December 2nd. I read it and Tweeted at 6:16 PM EST the same day. And then I received said email from Mr. Bough at 5:21 PM on December 4. The lesson here is that social media has eyes everywhere and the network to make sure that advertisers can no longer hide stuff in niche markets. There is a word in intelligence about just this thing, and it relates to messaging and propaganda: backwash. Social media makes backwash inevitable. Here’s another one from Intelligence: blowback. Backwash leads to blowback.

There’s no way to isolate this kind of advertisement. And there is an inverse proportion between how badly you want your ad to remain niche and the sensationalism surrounding its discovery. It’s a really obvious point, but one still clearly worth stating: The internet makes it impossible for any marketer to control which geographies and demographics see any particular communication. You can’t even really control what media it appears in. Think you’re creating an edgy print ad that will only be seen in a German magazine? Think again. In the blink of an eye, your ad is on the web. You know, the world wide one. And all kinds of people are pissed off.

What I like about what “Bough, Bonin {PEP}” did here is that he responded almost immediately, rather personally, and opened himself up to us social media mavens. Bravo! Full marks. Another thing I like about his apology is that there is a very good chance that I am being played, that Mr. Bough is playing reverse psychology on me. Yes, he readily approved my posting of this message when I asked, which leads me to believe that the very act of clicking on the post right now is just going to help PepsiCo with an amazingly-savvy viral marketing campaign for PepsiMax.

(Cross-posted from over at Chris Abraham — Because the Medium is the Message)

I just received this newsletter from the gang over at WebProNews AU, Blogging To Better SEO, that puts into words a lot of what we do for our clients every day as part of our Social Media consultancy and even what we do incidentally for our Public Relations clients.

With all of our social media outreach, we at Abraham Harrison LLC work on providing earned media for our clients. As I wrote in The current crop of advertisement methods is too ephemeral, it is important to decide where you want to spend your limited resources. Do you want to spend it on contextual ads? Contextual ads can drive a lot of traffic immediately to your target, to be sure, but when you stop paying for your key words, everything comes to a halt. All that traffic goes away… and, even while you’re paying for the ads, the conversion might not be there — it might just be a waste of money, a budget burn.

When you put your time and budget into blogger outreach, social media outreach, and blogging, your results may be less immediate than they are with ads, but whatever coverage you get, whatever earned media — and it can be an astounding amount of coverage, too — never goes away. Never! It becomes permanent record on the Interwebs, stashed and findable on Google until the Internet collapses through some sort of evil DNS hack.

Blogging To Better SEO by Manoj Jasra

[...]

[Manoj]: Why kinds of benefits can an organization expect with the implementation of a blog (and some of the natural SEO benefits that come with a blog)

[Lee Odden]: When a blog publishes AND promotes useful content, the benefits include:

• More content to be spidered by search engines and an increased footprint of the brand via search
• More links from other sites to the blog and improved search engine visibility
• Non-search engine traffic from social media sites and direct links from other blogs
• Direct communication with customers and prospects via RSS
• Depending on the blog structure and content, increased contacts by journalists that want to use blog content or authors as subject matter experts
• Increased leads or sales as a result of blog content – direct or indirect

[...]

I tell anyone who will listen to me that the current crop of advertisement methods is too short-lived. The moment you spend the money and your ad runs, that is the moment it is either gone to the grave or becomes a patient existing on life support. Either you’re smart and willing to keep it alive, in conversation, online on YouTube for the spots, or on a blog somewhere for the print work — or you feel compelled to keep on throwing money at it ad infinitum, because contextual ads, banner ads, etc, only last as long as you write checks.

What my specialty is is online conversation marketing, online public relations, and online earned media. When you earn peoples’ attention and when they choose to speak about you, your clients, and your services, then you have a gift that keeps on giving — this is content that lasts well past the campaign and into the future. This is both the sort of thing that Google loves — it is SEO catnip — and it is just the sort of content that flows, both upstream to A-list bloggers and to mainstream media and down to your readers, aggregators, and to other bloggers and other blogs.

If you want to see some examples of powerfully successful blogger outreaches, check out International Medical Corps (IMC) 2008, Survivor Corps Operation Survivor 2008, and Fresh Air Fund Summer 2008, Jerry White’s I Will Not Be Broken book promotion. In many cases, these campaigns are close to a year old, yet they still still live in hundreds and hundreds of blogs and feed Google’s index until all of these blogs are taken down. It is really amazing how effective this sort of “advertising” promotion works. What’s better, when the campaign is over and the client “turns off” our tap, the content continues living and isn’t just shut off like it is with banners, buttons, and contextual advertising. Very interesting, very cool, and powerfully effective.

Remember how much fun Communication Arts is to page through? — CA is intoxicating! Well, every ad you make can be as interesting, as long as you’re willing to come out of your art department and share your process, share your experience, share your steps. Keeping those ephemera alive through narrative, sharing, conversation, and story, is what social media is, it is what customer service is, it is surely what branding should be.

Anyway, There is a lot of opportunity in this time of chaos, of this time of transition. The same sort of transition (and opportunity) happened when PCs came online, replacing the IBM Selectric II; when the Internet changed E-Commerce, threatening to eviscerate bricks and mortar stores, and it is happening now, more than ever, with advertising, marketing, and PR.

I call it white knuckle syndrome: holding on to the handholds you have, frozen on the face of the cliff, because you don’t know where the handholds of the future are. This chaos is pretty amazing to watch as the economy pitches and GM bails on Super Bowl.

Advertising knows it needs to jump off the locomotive before it pitches into the gorge (the bridge is out!) but reaching out to the proffered hand of the guy in the helicopter seems pretty risky too. But, as the current handholds become chalky and you start to feel them crumble under your weight, you’ll need to find somewhere else to go, and quick!

To me, Chris Brogan said it best the other day on Twitter, “customer service is the new PR.*” Looking at what @comcastcares has been able to do, customer service is the new PR, the new marketing, and the new advertising.

So, as those handholds start to get chalk and begin to crumble, it is important to at least set your eyes on a new handhold — or maybe a helping hand — before your original handhold turns to powder.

And for you who have yet to do the reading, please check out Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversation.

(Cross-Posted via Chris Abraham — Because the Medium is the Message)

Avenue A/Razorfish, the digital ad and media planning service has partnered with Pluck, the social media technology company to create AdLife, which apparently will be a traditional digital advertising tool with social media marketing elements.   It will incorporate things like user-generated content in online ad units.

This could be a big deal.  Or maybe not.  I want to know more.  I’m wondering how the content will be generated.  In real time?  How will it be delivered/transferred to an ad unit?  If a guy in Boise writes a review for a book and it ends up on an ad, will I get that ad even though I have no idea who the guy from Boise is?

Sounds like I’ll be contacting some PR folks.  Or, for that matter, I’ll just ask Shiv Singh.

I just witnessed the most disgusting ad presentation I’ve ever seen on the internet.  The ad itself wasn’t intentionally meant to offend, but it’s format did something that was inexcusable.

Being a native New Englander, I often  got to  Boston.com to check out sports stories.  That’s what I just did a few minutes ago.  Right there, in front of me, was a story “Northboro Native Killed in Washington DC Accident”.  A photo of her shows a pretty, young fresh faced young woman, with a beaming smile.  Now that I live in the DC area, I was especially intrigued by this.  I was once 22 and lived in DC.  Young.  Idealistic.

So I went to click through to read the story.  In the corner of my eye, I began to notice  a ‘growing’ ad coming across the page.  One of those ads that form images across a web page.  In this case they were images of the walking footprints of what looked to be that of a hiker.  The footprints continued across the woman’s face and would not let me click through to read the story.  That’s because just as I pressed down on my mouse, the ad crossed over the exact spot where it was pointing to.  Suddenly, I was transported to another site, the landing page of the ad.  Tourism in New Brunswick.

When I finally got back to the site I wanted to be at and clicked through the story I wanted, I began reading:

A Northborough woman and Amherst College graduate beginning her career in Washington, D.C., was killed in the nation’s capital yesterday morning when she was run over by a garbage truck while riding her bicycle to work.

…beginning her career…killed in the nation’s capital…run over by a garbage truck”…riding her bicycle to work”…

Her young life snuffed out just like that.  Full of promise, full of life, now gone.

But we want to show you this ad first – the ad is more important.

This is definitely not the way to do things, folks.  These ad formats, while enticing, should not be used by news outlets.  At least on their front pages.  News outlets cover news and news is more often bad, or in some cases, tragic.  It isn’t worth the ad dollars.

Advertisers shouldn’t necessarily shy away from using these formats, but they should be very judicious in where they buy them.  They should look for sites that viewers come to be entertained.  I don’t care how effective they are.  Use another formats on front pages of news sites.

From Drew B’s Take on Tech PR via Nixon McInnes & Chris Abraham:

“Only 18% of TV ad campaigns generate positive ROI”

“The average person is exposed to 3000 advertising messages a day”

“36% of people think more positively of companies who have blogs”

I quickly realized that StumbleUpon is the coolest and hottest social bookmarking service nobody has heard of.  I love it but I don’t nearly use it enough: either as a stumbler or as a marketer. I found this on Blog Marketing Journal and thought I would open it up to you:

In case you are not familiar with the concept, StumbleUpon allows you to pay for visitors to your pages, five cents per visitor or click. The question is, do you consider this to be a simple form of paid advertising, or paid social bookmarking.

I have done some experiments with paid Stumbling and what BMJ says is true:

If you set a limit of $20 per day, you will get 400 visitors. They may stay on your page or they may spend five seconds and disappear. Where the situations changes is when they thumbs up your page. That’s a stumble and can lead to more than just the 400 visitors.

So, in this case, content is key, and good content will result in conversions and interest.  If you just throw money at it without thinking your content or strategy through, you will be disappointed with the results, especially since there’s nobody on the planet more savvy than the gang from StumbleUpon — these are earl-adopters and are just the people you want to love you but these are the worse people to piss off. Just because you’re paying to have your content promoted doesn’t mean that people are prevented from digging the content down (thumbs-down) or writing scathing comments.

Either way, I encourage you to install the Firefox or Internet Explorer plugin and start playing with it — you need to register first, of course. I also encourage you to throw some money at the pay-to-play paid StumbleUpon advertising scheme — it is amazing fun and if you have any cool content at all, it is so much more rewarding that trying to game digg or even organically start StumbleLove — if you’re not really into Stumbling (I have friends who actually spend their evenings Stumbling in lieu of TV) then paying to get started is a very good idea and worth a test — you can check out the FAQ first:

Overview

• How does StumbleUpon work?
• Can I see a demo of StumbleUpon?
• What kind of content works well with StumbleUpon?
• Where will my content appear?
• How can I get Viral Marketing from StumbleUpon?
• Do I need to create an ad?
• What am I paying for? What do I get?
• How is this different from PPC, pops, banners…?
• Why doesn’t StumbleUpon do pops, banners…?
• How does StumbleUpon prevent click-fraud?
• I have a suggestion/question/feature-request, who should I contact?
• Is StumbleUpon right for my business?

Features

• How can I target a specific audience?
• What kind of traffic volume can I expect?
• How can I increase how much traffic I get?
• Can I set spending/traffic limits?
• Can I use tracking code?
• My Google Analytics / Urchin stats don’t match. Why the difference?
• What frequency caps does StumbleUpon use?
• Can I promote multiple URLs?
• Can I create multiple campaigns?
• How long does it for a new campaign to start?
• How can I tell if my campaigns are performing well?
• What kind of reporting is available?
• I want a Run of Network (RON) campaign – how do I do that?
• How do I target just a certain city, but not by topic?
• How can I target multiple topics/demographics?
• How do StumbleUpon members know that my site has been sponsored?
• Can I make any changes to my campaigns?
• How long does the review process take?

Content Guidelines

• Are there any content restrictions for the URL’s submitted?

Payment

• What forms of payment does StumbleUpon accept?
• How long before my funds are active and traffic is delivered?
• What is the process for requesting a refund?
• How long does it take for refunds to be issued?

Your Account

• I forgot my password, how do I get it back?
• One of my campaigns was not accepted, what can I do?
• Can I stop or pause one of my campaigns?
• How can I rename my campaigns to better organize them?
• What is Approval rating?

Contacting StumbleUpon

• Questions about StumbleUpon Advertising?

Via Chris Abraham.