A Dr. Pepper Facebook campaign in the UK severely backfired when the Coca Cola owned brand started an edgy campaign to attract the attention of young customers.
The campaign got Facebook users to allow the advertiser to take over their Facebook status - the usually short blurb of text that one uses to let people know what is going on in their life at any given moment. Teens and young adults make frequent updates revealing everything from what they are doing to what they are thinking or worrying about. The update appears on their own profile page as well as on all of their Facebook friends pages as soon as it is published.
In the UK, over 160,000 people with Facebook accounts signed up to allow Dr. Pepper access to their status to publish updates. The status messages were mostly embarrassing statements, bordering on tasteless, but the red line was crossed when a mother noticed that her teenage daughter’s status made reference to a porn film.
Coca Cola’s response? “As soon as we became aware of this, we took immediate action and removed the status update from the application. We have also taken the decision to end the promotion. We will take all steps necessary to ensure this does not happen again”. They also offered to host the family that was offended in a hotel for one night. The family declined the offer.
Such a campaign raises many questions. First, there is the issue about children clicking to agree to some advertising campaign and so easily allowing them to enter their supposed “private” network of friends and to actually take over their virtual persona. There are some very serious potential consequences that I will explore with you in future posts. But consider that if a respected corporation like Coca Cola has run such a campaign, what others have in line for us. And second, it should remind all of us that Parental Control software is not about whether we trust our children to use the Internet safely. When a huge corporation pushes pornography to young consumers online without any warning, it just drives home how vulnerable children – and anyone online – can be to harmful content like pornography.
