College of Ontario

When controversy can work in marketers' favour

Hollie Shaw
National Post
July 11, 2008

Ethics in advertising can be a divisive topic, and when word-of-mouth marketing enters the conversation it can get even more heated.

Consumers might do a wonderful job of chatting up your product. On the other hand, they can also be unpredictable, inaccurate and profane. And the Internet, which has spawned a word-of-mouth revival in recent years through blogs, chat rooms and social-networking sites, has few censors.

Molson Canada learned that lesson last fall after running a Facebook contest that asked students to post party pictures online and vie for the title of "No. 1 Party School in Canada." The school with the most pictures uploaded would win a trip for five people for spring break in Cancun, Mexico. But after a barrage of criticism suggesting the promotion encouraged a binge-drinking school culture, the company ended the contest a week early.

"As a company we had to make a decision – we weren't happy with the way it was going," Ross Buchanan, director of digital relationship marketing at Molson Canada, said at a recent panel on word-of-mouth marketing sponsored by the Canadian Marketing Association.

"We tried to generate school spirit, get something people could rally behind," he said. But some young people "took it another way," as an endorsement of boasting about partying on campus, he said. Still, the experiment will not deter Molson from working in social media in the future. "As a company we've learned about this media – but we're not going to stop [using it]."

Toeing the ethical line just enough to generate controversy, however, can often work in a marketer's favour.

Toronto agency Smith Roberts garnered widespread attention for its inventive OBAY "mystery campaign" for Colleges Ontario. The campaign, a play on the word "obey", was splashed on billboards and bus shelters across Ontario and seemed to promote a fictitious drug that stifled all independent thought in children and made them heed all their parents' wishes.

"We knew we were walking a fine line with the connection to drugs," said Malcolm Roberts, president of Smith Roberts. But most people understood it was a joke. Still, he said, "we did have an issue around the 'teaser' phase where the client was starting to worry. There were rumours that [the campaign] was being done by Scientologists."

Research later revealed the campaign generated 25 million consumer impressions, 300 blog posts and consumer-generated groups on Facebook and Flickr. "The biggest fear in buzz marketing is that when you do the 'reveal,' nobody cares," Mr. Roberts said.

Although the point of the campaign was to provoke and generate attention, he noted the company did not look at ethical guidelines or discuss them with its clients before the campaign. "That is something we would do next time," given the rapidly evolving nature of online marketing and word of mouth.

So how do large corporations with reputations to uphold navigate the ethically murky world of social media, now an integral feature of most offline campaigns? Mr. Buchanan said Molson does not interfere with online commentary, whether the content is generated on public or Molson-run Web sites.

Nevertheless, Molson Coors is a member of Blog Council, a forum to share best practices among big corporations that blog, including Coca-Cola Co., Dell, General Motors, Microsoft and Procter &Gamble and Wal-Mart. Mr. Buchanan also said Molson never does anything in secret -- such as creating fake blogs or phony reality videos, such as the "Wig Out" viral video by Capital C for Sunsilk hair care. "If you are going to try to hide it, that's when you get into trouble," Mr. Buchanan said.

Tony Chapman, chief executive of Capital C, says he makes no apologies for the video, which was made with the intent of popularizing the phrase "wig out" and associate it with a bad hair day. Later, Sunsilk would pick up on a "wig out" as a problem it could fix. "The beauty of YouTube is that the best entertainer gets the [attention]," he said. "We did [another] YouTube [video] and only got 1,300 views. It was a dog."

David Jones, vice-president of digital communications at Hill & Knowlton, said pushing the envelope is right for some brands. "A beer company should expect to be given a longer leash than a bank," he said. "To be too worried about bending the rules or to tell artists that they can't play with a public space like Facebook -- that would make [social media] a very dull place."

While those in the industry debate ethics, there is also much debate about the effectiveness of word-of-mouth communication. A study by Keller Fay Group found face-to-face or telephone-based word-of-mouth is more likely to be credible than online conversations (59% compared with 29%).