Topic: Online marketing
I know this is sooo last week, but the contretemps over the Motrin online ad that offended a small group of “mommy bloggers” with active twitter accounts earlier this month (Ad Age is calling it “Motrin-Gate”) is emerging as an early case study in the perils of over-reacting to online social activism.
Topline reacap: Johnson & Johnson launched the online campaign targeting young mothers for Motrin, and created through the New York office of the
Canadian agency Taxi, at the end of September. The voice-over of the video featured a mom who said she carried her baby in a sling in part because she sees it as “a fashion statement” and made her feel like an “official mom.” It garnered reasonable traffic at motrin.com, but really hardly any notice until Nov 15, a Saturday, when a woman in Colorado commented negatively on the ad on her personal blog (she apparently found it condescending). Within hours that post cascaded into a couple of other blog posts and hundreds of twitter tweets per hour, which then got amplified by the original bloggers and picked up by the mainstream media, including a New York Times blog, the WSJ and Reuters. A day later –we’re talking Sunday- J&J pulled down the site. It reactivated the site the next day with an apology to anyone who was offended. At that point, the rest of the media had piled onto the story.
But as Paul Harvey used to say, “and now… the rest of the story.”
The Globe and Mail’s Mathew Ingram, writing a wrap-up analysis a whole four days later suggested J&J jumped the gun by yanking its ad. He termed the outcry a social media “flash flood” –essentially a dramatic, but temporary, storm that came and went within 72 hours that left very little lasting change in the overall environment.
Ingram also pointed out that a closer examination of the twitter posts showed a good proportion of them to be positive and supportive of the Motrin vid. A second Ad Age piece on the controversy this week expands on Matt’s thesis (and gives him props for coining the apt “flash flood” metaphor). It suggests best evidence is that there were probably only just over 1,000 people commenting on the whole Motrin question on Twitter –which it archly notes at this stage only accounts for “generously” 0.15 of Internet users in the U.S. – and of those only 35% were overtly negative, with the remainder neutral or positive. It calculates the total equivalent media value of all the online talk was no more than the cost of one 30 second spot on a cable news network.
Marketers and communicators are constantly being told they need to watch what’s being said about them in social media and react in real time. But the Motrin case underscores that there is perhaps such a thing as being too reactive.
Easy to say, mind you. When you’re in the middle of storm it’s hard to think straight. Especially when you’re not sure if you’re about to be hit by a temporary flash flood or by a Katrina-sized levy breach.
One of the people quotes in Ad Age suggests part of the problem for J&J is they may not have had systematic measurement tools and processes in place to figure out just what the reaction on things like Twitter really is.
Getting those kind of thing in place is a good start, although it probably won't help a whole lot just yet. At some point, there will be a commonly accepted understanding of how these things normally play out. Until then, we’ll likely see more situations like this.
