Commentary
Gawker Pranks Coke - So What?
- by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, February 6, 2015
Gawker did a funny this week by making Coca-Cola tweet racist stuff, and it was hilarious. In addition to being side-splittingly humorous, the prank actually raises a serious question, although perhaps not the one Gawker intended: should brands be held responsible for stupid troll attacks that they obviously didn’t intend or expect?
The prank took advantage of Coca-Cola’s “Make It Happy” campaign, launched in conjunction with the Super Bowl, which invited users to combat online nastiness by retweeting negative tweets with the #MakeItHappy hashtag; Coca-Cola would then turn the negative tweets into cheery little word-pictures on its Twitter account. Overall the idea is a little bit, I don’t know, silly and sappy, but it’s a nice sentiment and people seem to go for that kind of stuff.
Those naughty imps at Gawker used the #MakeItHappy hashtag to tweet the opening passages from Adolf Hitler’s frothing memoir-manifesto Mein Kampf, which Coca-Cola’s account dutifully turned into happy images of a balloon dog, a sloth snoozing in a recliner, a cat playing the drums, and so on.
The prank targeted an obvious flaw in Coca-Cola’s system, which automatically rendered text into images without much in the way of human oversight. In that way Gawker pedantically made the same point that has already been made any number of times elsewhere -- to wit, that marketers risk damaging their brands by turning control over to unknown entities online.
All this naturally raises the question: who cares? Does anyone out there think that because someone played a trick on Coke, the company is actually racist? Does it really warrant suspending the whole campaign? Indeed, does the presence of tiresome trolls and preening pedants on the Internet really obviate all interactive and participatory marketing (however silly the idea was in the first place)?
(Incidentally, aside from the first “Fourteen Word” oath, a racist classic, the bulk of the Hitler quotations Gawker submitted weren’t identifiably racist, or even particularly Hitlerian in that venomous spittle-flecked way for which Mr. Sweaty Cowlick was so infamous.
True, there is some talk of uniting countries with Germanic blood, and his famous statement that “the tears of war will produce the daily bread for the generations to come,” but nothing that would really register on our fine-tuned 21st-century offense-o-meters. Rather, it’s a standard, dry, colorless opening to a memoir that could have been written any time in the 19th or early 20th century -- and anyone who cared to decipher the text from the Coke ASCII pictures would probably just find it puzzling.)
Erik Sass is editor of Publishers Daily. You can reach Erik at eriksass@gmail.com.
Great, great column. I once worked at a place where it seemed people seemed hostile to each other just for the "fun" of it. That's what this Gawker stunt seemed to be.
Okay, the Coke campaign is, was, excuse me, more than a bit silly and way too easy a target for Gawker's typically adolescent meanness. I guess this is why we can't have nice things on the Internet. :)
None of this is humorous or funny. Troll attacks or anything else you want to call one company targeting another company such as this should be illegal with the attack company losing its ability to continue to do it ever again even if it means the company must dissolve due to fines so large their profit sinks whereby the sky high office folk now live above a slimy garage. This is not OK for a myriad of reasons.
This was hilarious and I thought it was brilliant. Oh, by the way, @Paula Lynn, how about it be made illegal for you to criticize someone else's conduct with huge fines? Ever heard of the First Amendment? As it has been said many times, the answer to speech we don't agree with is not to silence them, but to have more speech in rebuttal, as you have done. If you don't like what someone says, you should say so. But if you demand that there be a "heckler's veto" silencing someone because you don't like what they have to say, doesn't that mean someone else then should be allowed to silence you because they don't like what you have to say?