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Of course, there are things that can be done to steer a brand or a company in the right direction, but control is simply an illusion. Right now, off in some dark (or not so dark) corner of the Internet, some people are huddled around a virtual campfire, making fun of your commercials, of the experience they had with someone from your customer service team, or of how unbelievable your latest tagline is. Or maybe they're praising you. You probably don't know one way or the other, unless someone stumbled across the discussion in a Google search and forwarded a link to the legal department.
One theory we've seen proved beyond a shadow of a doubt in the Internet Age is that flexing political or legal muscle to force compliance with the official message has the exact opposite effect. It has the opposite effect, in part, because attempting to force compliance of thought is antithetical to the notion of freedom of thought. Different things have different meanings for different people, and when advertisers try to make an entire marketplace of people think the same thing about their brand or their company, the result is often a resounding chuckle. When that laugh reverberates online through social networking, community and discussion sites, it enrages advertisers. When advertisers try to stop it, those actions infuriate people.
If I see an ad for Acme Red Rubber Balls ("The Highest-Bouncing Rubber Balls in the World"), and I find that claim disingenuous, I might find one of their online ads, import it into Photoshop, and change the tagline to read "Acme: The Highest-Bouncing Balls Made of Stone in the World." I might post that ad to my blog to share it with some friends. Maybe we all have a laugh about it.
In the U.S., Acme would be well within its rights to sue me into next week. But we know where that path leads. When I get my legal nastygram, I'll scan it in, post it to my blog and make the whole situation much worse for Acme. I'll rant to anyone who will listen, claiming and abridgement of my free speech rights. Some people will disagree with me and a lot won't. The result will be even more damage to Acme's reputation--mostly because they can't take a joke. There is an easier way, and it involves respect for the fact that people aren't robots that think what advertisers tell them to think.
There are companies out there who have learned to embrace the fact that they don't have control. Mastercard and GM come to mind, as they've taken steps to let people put their own personal stamp on commercials and campaign ideas. But we've still got a long way to go, particularly since the default response to a loss of message control is to release the legal hounds.
The illusion of control is being dispelled, in large part due to the ways people can and do connect through the Internet.
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Would you agree that mass-users will pick the funniest, most interesting, smartest [or, ghm, silliest but in a good and effective kind of way], most current and relevant ads?
The column itself is 20 years old, which should tell you how old this thing is. I'd theorize that such a thing wouldn't be nearly as persistent in the Information Age. According to the column I just linked, the rumors claimed that a P&G official went on Donahue and confirmed the link between P&G and the Church of Satan. Today's bloggers would tear that one apart, considering no such show existed, and it would be easy for people to verify that no such show had ever run.
That's not to say that rumors can't take hold in the Information Age. It's just that in the hyperaccelerated marketplace of ideas, such rumors are usually dispatched fairly quickly.
Moreover, if the Church of Satan rumor had plagued P&G in 2006 rather than in 1986, perhaps a better strategy for combatting it would be to have the CEO post something on his blog that refuted the claims.
The marketplace of ideas works. The cream really does rise to the top. It would rise faster if people at companies participated meaningfully and left the legal beagles at home.
Everyone seems to have an opinion and a blog from which to express it.
However, to allow external forces to define your commodity, is wrong.
Even before the Internet, P&G was battling the idea that it fronted a Satanic cult. Somehow, their logo was interpreted to represent the devil. Apparently, before it became Urban Legend, it appears some Amway distributors started the story. Ah, the financial motive.
No one said that marketing was easy. But companies have to be even more diligent about negative perspectives, regardless if it is a covert campaign by a competitor or someone ranting on myspace.
Corporations can't be expected to created "mindthink" and shape opinion. But they better be there to protect themselves, their products and their reputations.
Barbara Friedland www.adtractive.net
Also, even if we as marketers don't "embrace a loss of control" we have lost control. That is a fact we can't avoid anymore.
One easy place to acknowledge this loss of control, in my opinion, is internally. If a companies' employees aren't proud of what they do and subsequently talking about it then there are problems. When there are problems we tend to paint a rosie picture with our advertising rather than fix the problems.
I mean, we're all free-thinking human beings here. I'd argue that most companies would be better off embracing the idea of people playing with their ads than trying to clamp down on the practice. GM and Mastercard are on their way to embracing free thought. Admittedly, there have been bumps along the road (check out the commercials people made slamming Hummer's gas guzzling), but these two companies are a lot better off than the companies out there who think they have control over the message and sic the lawyers on anyone who thinks otherwise.
I love the post and I know exactly where you are going. However, does ACME or ACME's creative agency have any rights when it comes to altering their ad? It is one thing to dispute their claims, but what about altering a most likely copyrighted piece of material.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric www.ericfrenchman.com