In an era of viral marketing, hoaxes involving vomiting waiters,
suicide bombers, decapitated cats and e-mails wrongly accusing
companies of anti-war sentiments, how do you control a brand's
image?
All of the above examples have been circulated without the
knowledge or permission of the brands in question: Canadian singer
Bryan Adams, Volkswagen, Ford Motor Company and
Starbucks. With everyone's brand image up for grabs, how can
PR professionals prevent seismic fallout with an unregulated
Internet and a growing number of mainstream companies experimenting
virally?
The answer is still evolving but, for now, it involves a modicum
of both control and letting go.
The latest viral hoax involved a Valentine's Day fake Web site
called "Who Ordered Room Service?" that attracted more than 25,000
viewers. It featured a waiter vomiting over a kissing couple to
tracks from Adams' album "Room Service." For creators Frank Lesser
and Jason Woliner, filmmakers from New York, it was a prank that
took on a life of its own.
"We decided to make a fake viral-marketing campaign for Adams'
new album," Lesser says. "It wasn't out of malice. We wanted a song
to reach people on Valentine's Day. Plus Jason and I were irritated
by viral marketing being seen as 'just something that some crazy
kids put up' when, in fact, it's often done by big companies to
manipulate people."
Adams declined to comment. However, a spokesman for his record
company, Universal Music Canada, tells PR News: "We
don't put much stock in it. It's just one of those things."
The Starbucks brand also fell victim to a freewheeling Internet
when a U.S. Marine misguidedly posted an e-mail accusing the
company of not supporting U.S. troops in Iraq and refusing to send
coffee to military outposts there. After Starbucks contacted the
Marine, he sent out an e-mail apology, but Starbucks still gets
calls about it. Starbucks decliend to comment.
VW's image got hijacked in the U.K. by a freelance creative team
called Dan and Lee, which created a spoof Polo (car model) ad
featuring a suicide bomber attempting to blow himself up in a busy
shopping area. The car absorbs the blast and ends with the real
Polo tagline, "Small but tough."
VW, not surprisingly, was a tad upset and threatened to sue
because of breach of copyright and damage to the brand, but it
backed down after a formal apology. "It was a spec ad they created
to put on their reel to get work from us," says Paul Buckett, head
of press and public relations at Volkswagen Group U.K. "The
ad got out, and people thought it was genuine. This company takes a
pride in our brand, and we're not stupid enough to have produced
this."
At least VW knew who the perpetrators were. Ford in the
U.K. was not so lucky. When an ad for the company's Sportka,
showing a computer-animated cat's head being sliced off, began
running virally last March, both agency and company disavowed it.
While ad agency Ogilvy & Mather originally had created
the video for Ford, it denied it was ever meant to run.
Mysteriously e-mailed around the world, Ford and O&M were
unable to stop it, and they got blasted by animal-rights
organizations. Described as "complete torture" by someone
associated with the campaign, Mike Walsh, CEO of O&M Europe,
Africa and Middle East, even wrote a newspaper column, pleading the
agency's (and Ford's) case that the ad was "false and
malicious."
But even after that debacle, Ford is considering doing other
virals. "So it can't be all bad," says Maria Andrews, commercial
director at London's The Viral Factory, which made the
original Sportka video. "When you're dealing with PR, it's that
fine balance of 'oh yes, we endorse it, and oh no, it's dreadful'
because, if it's naughty and banned, it'll definitely go
contagious."
Given that the role of viral marketing is to attract a youth
market resistant to more conventional sales pitches, such hoaxers
can succeed beyond their wildest dreams.
But the potential damage to companies trying to use it as a
legitimate means of promotion is huge.
According to Brian Clark, president of GMD Studios and
chairman of the 18-month-old Viral and Buzz Marketing
Association, "From a PR point of view, it's best to become part
of the conversation rather than try and control what they say. The
flip side is controlling brand loyalty in a way that engenders
loyalty rather than becoming intrusive. But it's all the signs of a
young industry searching for signals."
Brenda Wrigley, associate professor of PR at the SI Newhouse
School of Public Communications at Syracuse University,
agrees. "We really don't have any regulations, and it's uncharted
territory. We're talking about freedom of speech, which we don't
want to abridge," she says. "You'd be crazy if you're a big company
and don't have a media-monitoring system. You've got to know what's
out there and respond quickly."
Part of the problem is that some companies themselves have set
up fake Web sites to fool their own consumers. Two years ago, for
example, ESPN/Sega launched a fake Web site along with a
fake blogger called Beta-7 to promote a football video game.
While some followers believed it, others weren't fooled.
"It's a slippery slope if you go to the edge of creativity,"
Wrigley says. "You're inviting this kind of thing to happen back to
you. In some organizations, you get a freewheeling kind of culture,
and people are careless. Remember, the Boeing CEO was brought down
by an e-mail. People don't think of the ramifications of what they
do."
How can PR execs help to protect their companies? "Taking legal
action and immediately closing the site down is one thing," VW's
Buckett says, "but it was new territory for us. We learned a) how
quickly it spreads and b) we were fortunate in knowing those
involved. Not everyone will."
As Andrew Nibley, chairman of Burson-Marsteller U.S.,
points out, "This always happens when there's new technology that
requires more vigilance on everyone's part. When faxes happened,
people sent out fakes and we had to redouble our efforts to check
up on them. Companies will have to go back to basics and monitor
everything."
Might online hoaxes be fleeting? "It could just be momentary,"
Wrigley says, "but it if gets out of control, I would hate to see
Internet regulation."
Lesser warns companies about putting out campaigns that hide
their true origins: "They're making themselves a target. But that's
the nature of the Internet -- it's a free market for creative
ideas."
Contacts: Frank Lesser, 917.375.9707, [email protected]; Brenda
Wrigley, 315.443.1911; Paul Buckett, 011.44.908.601.187; Brian
Clark, 407.657.8990, [email protected]; Maria
Andrews, 44. 20.7613.7300, [email protected];
Andrew Nibley, 212.614.4399, [email protected]
A Measure Of Viral Ethics
The two biggest issues with viral marketing are ethics and
measurement. While the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA)
is setting up a code of ethics, Brian Clark, chairman of the Viral
and Buzz Marketing Association, suggests adapting existing
measurement strategies that fuse the advertising and PR measurement
models: Look at Web site traffic - including the number of visits
and the time spent on each visit - and then couple that with
measurement of the outside world.