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.
No comments:
Post a Comment