Redemption for evil, greedy banks?

I came across this post on Twitter the other day:

@agencyspy: "Mint.com tells me stuff about my bank accounts before my bank. #chasefail"

Agencyspy is a advertising gossip blog that I follow on twitter and RSS. Obviously he/she fully acknowledges that they are a person with a twitter account and can use Twitter for their own personal ends, including expressing his/her frustration with banks. Agencyspy’s 9323 followers are now aware of those frustrations – and the #chasefail hashtag.

Searching that hashtag only brings up four results, one of which is a retweet of agencyspy. Hardly damaging to Chase's reputation, but the seed has been planted, and the fire has been lit, to mix absurd metaphors.

If you're not a Twitter user that might sound like Klingon.

What this all means is that a 'key influencer' is upset with his/her bank and letting all his/her 'influencees' know about it. Some 9000 people now know that they can get better banking info from Mint.com than from Chase – and they believe it because this opinion comes from a trusted source.

When people create a hashtag like #yourbrandFAIL, they can quickly gain widespread adoption, (like the #pepsifail hashtag that gained popularity in response to Amp energy drink’s ‘Amp up before you score’ iPhone app).

So, what’s a bank to do?

First, they should be listening. If they’re not, they’ve completely blown an opportunity to engage upset customers, solve their problems and improve their services based on real feedback from real people who use their stuff.

Which leads to the second thing, which is to capitalize on these opportunities. They know they have one influential but pissed off customer. If an empowered Chase CSR sent @agencyspy a direct message, asking about his/her complaint, addressed his/her concerns and thanked him/her for their help in improving their services, @agencyspy might be sufficiently impressed to tweet about the experience, which in turn might make his/her 9000 followers feel a little bit better about the big, evil bank as well.

9000 followers is pretty pathetic in terms of traditional media impressions, but these tweets are powerful impressions. There are mystical forces at work here – Schadenfreude for instance. Everyone knows banks are totally evil and your normally quiet average Joe will gleefully rip a bank a new one if given the opportunity. This is compounded by the nature of the medium. Gladwell’s Tipping Point is another mystical force that will spread latent discontent across the twittershpere with incredible speed.

So, if I worked for a bank, I’d be listening very carefully to things like this. I'd address these concerns, both internally and the public perception of them. And I’d take every opportunity I could to steal the disgruntled customers of my competition who might not be listening as closely as I am.

Piss people off, make more money.

Face it: no matter what you do in this business, you're going to piss off someone, somewhere, sometime. Really, we are all trolls of every stripe lurking in basements all over the world. We scour the web for things we find offensive and we've now got the means to scream bloody murder when we find our tender sensibilities offended. The brands we scream about are listening, but how much do they really care about what's being said?

This week's great offense is Amp Energy drink's "Amp Up Before You Score" iPhone app which, according to critics, "encourages men to look at women as objects to be won, used, and tossed away after a "victory" is obtained."

Wow. You knew eventually there'd be an app for that.

Of course, last week it was Mr. Sub's apparently homophobic ad that upset the GLBT community, and ended up with the agency, Bos, losing the account. Before that is was NHL enforcer, George Laraque's sexist ad for Octane 7.0 drink.

Don't get me wrong, it's offensive if you're over the age of say, 17 and have any respect for women whatsoever. I'm not going to defend the questionable morality of any of these ads. But, frankly I don't care all that much. Like I said, no matter what you do, you're bound to piss someone off. In fact, the Amp app is tasteless, but taken tongue-in-cheek it's actually pretty humorous (and you'd have to be a retard to think it would do you any good with the girls).

The real point of all this is that these efforts are generally made by very smart agencies who are perfectly aware of what they're doing. R/GA, who made the Amp iPhone app, is a true thought-leader and pioneer in digital marketing and I've got a lot of respect for what they do . It's hard to believe that app went out the door without someone saying "uh, guys, that's truly offensive." To the contrary, I'd be willing to bet that's the point where everyone involved likely rubbed their hands together with glee.

That's because it was probably designed to be offensive. The aim of the game here is to get noticed. It's Seth Godin's purple cow. It's disruption marketing--which, incidentally, is dead, according to pretty much every digital evangelist alive. Except it's not. It's alive and well and residing on your iPhone.

And it's not pissing off the group it was aimed at. It's making them happy as hell as they guffaw in the bar about the 20th girl who rolled her eyes at their juvenile passes that evening. Those guys love it because it pisses people off. And the more blogs and newspapers that write about how it pisses people off, the more those guys are going to like it. In the end Amp sells more energy drinks.

The only worry is that Amp gets connected to their parent, Pepsi. Then your average, joyous-yet-milquetoast Pepsi drinker gets offended and stops buying Pepsi. But really, isn't that something a bit of well-placed, soothing PR should be able to easily fix? Tweet out a quick apology, tsk tsk, we had no idea, so sorry. Regular folks are happy again and the bros are still macking and giggling away in the club.

It's all about getting someone's attention. There's a reason why brands segment audiences, why they listen to what people have to say and why they give people what they want. It's a hell of a lot easier to sell people stuff they actually want. But brands still have to grab people's attention first. And really, there's no better way to do that than getting lots of folks riled up and yammering about you.

Here's an awesome old video of my new idol, George Lois talking about advertising as 'poison gas'. Pissing people off isn't a new idea.

Herdsourcing and Crowdcrafting

Not too long ago Ad Age's Brian Sheehan took Unilever to task for their crowdsourcing efforts for Peperami. He railed that it's not actually crowdsourcing, at least not as it was intended in James Surowiecki's book "The Wisdom of Crowds." Of course that would imply that a crowd was actually wise. In fact, that crowd might even be wiser than its smartest member. He contends that mass collaboration is a key element of crowdsourcing. However that's not how crowdsourcing is being used in many cases these days.

I'm bringing up a semantic difference here, but to be fair to the term, what companies like Unilever, Brammo, Crowdspring, et al. are doing is actually crowdsourcing. In the simplest sense of the phrase, they're using a large group of people as a means to generate a large number of ideas, through which they can sift, curate and adjudicate to find the perfect solution to their business problems. They're sourcing from a crowd rather than the traditional approach of going to an organization specialized in solving those types of problems.

Sure, there's nothing idealistic in that and Brian Sheehan gave 'em hell for it. The ideal that comes from 'the phenomenon of collective intelligence iteratively brought to bear on a problem facilitated by the free communication of the internet' is a powerful one. But to be honest, crowdsourcing isn't really all that apt a term for it. I'd rather call it 'crowdcrafting'. It's got the ring of honest effort and valuable outcome to it. It's more apt for the wisdom of age and diversity converging to create something that might not otherwise exist.

I've also got a name for the bastardized process. The one that tries to get people to work for free, or better yet, because 'they want to feel like they're part of the brand'. That's more like 'herdsourcing'. It's a cattle call. It's an amateur talent show. It's not an iterative process and it'll only provide solutions that are as good as it's smartest member. In the end it's mostly a quantitative thing.

I can't help but think that herdsourcing comes from the same place committees do. Not that committees are inherently bad, but they're definitely safe and they produce similar results. A committee at its best is a collective of smart, experienced and diverse minds who come together to collaborate and shepherd a project. But they often lead to compromise and things tend to come out the other end of the process a little (often a lot) duller and tamer than they went in. But there's protection in a committee. Nobody takes the blame, and everyone can generally cover their own ass if shit goes south.

I think that's where herdsourcing comes from. If you don't trust yourself, trust your vision, then it's very difficult to make decisions. So you gather people around you to help you make those decisions. You hire an agency. But if you don't trust yourself it's hard to trust anyone else, so you don't trust your agency. "This idea is good...but is it good enough? Can't you guys show me another ten or twenty concepts? And incidentally, why is this costing so much?" So you do what Unilever did and you throw it out to the world in the hopes that you'll get ten thousand ideas that you can sift through like a gold prospector panning in the Yukon, hoping that somewhere in that big muddy stream of shit you can find a gleaming nugget that will save your brand. Or the diamond in the rough. Or the 'perfect' solution to your problem.

Special thanks to @noloveforbruce for helping to clarify the concept.