PETA Claims Wet Seal Swayed By Viral Campaign
- by Gavin O'Malley @mp_gavin, August 2, 2005
PETA began its Wet Seal campaign last December by posting a video documenting the harsh treatment of animals on a "fur farm" to its Web site PETA2.com. This June, after an anonymous MySpace member began circulating the footage on the MySpace network, weekly visits to the page skyrocketed from an average of 24,000 unique visits to over 350,000, according to Noah Cooper, a "street team specialist" with PETA.
David Benjamin, PETA's corporate liaison, said he sat down with Wet Seal CEO Joel Waller on July 20 to talk business. Benjamin said that Waller gave him his word that Wet Seal would not carry fur this coming fall, as long as PETA would stop pressuring the company.
Wet Seal did not respond to numerous telephone calls from OnlineMediaDaily seeking comment.
Benjamin said that once PETA received written assurance last week that Wet Seal would not carry fur this fall, the group called off its troops, issuing a moratorium on its campaign until January 2006--at which point it plans to meet with Wet Seal again to discuss its long-term fur policy. In a post on its site, the group asked visitors to stop all communications with the company. But the site still features the gruesome video footage.
PETA's effort, which leveraged the membership of social networking site MySpace, appears to illustrate marketers' newfound respect for online opinion, according to some analysts who were informed of PETA's claims by OnlineMediaDaily.
"Brand teams are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of responding to, and sometimes acting upon, online opinion," Jonathan Carson, CEO of Internet market researcher BuzzMetrics, said.
"Consumer-driven buzz storms ... are undeniably powerful, and so we are finding that marketers are more and more motivated to plan for potential situations that could involve their brands," said Carson.
Cooper said that MySpace--which was just acquired by News Corp. for $580 million in cash--"played a huge part" in spreading the campaign, adding that the traffic generated by MySpace was "unprecedented" for PETA. "We were getting 15,000 a day when we had The Beastie Boys' letter to Kentucky Fried Chicken in March, but that's only about 100,000 in a week."
And while market researchers contend that MySpace's power has yet to be fully appreciated, they say PETA should be credited as the real pioneer in this instance. "PETA's demonstrating once again their effective use of viral, pass-along marketing that's been a part of their efforts for a long time," said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer for buzz measurement and tracking firm Intelliseek Inc.
Blackshaw said that such online innovation is consistent with other activist organizations that don't have extra money to burn. "These guys don't waste time having big theoretical discussions about the long-term effectiveness of viral marketing like so many big corporations," Blackshaw said, adding: "they just do it, and put it to work--and it works."
Said BuzzMetrics' Carson: "Whether or not one agrees with their philosophy, PETA is a master of word-of-mouth marketing."
Wet Seal Inc. operates some 400 stores in the United States under the brands Wet Seal and Arden B, the latter aimed at a slightly older female demographic.
At the start of June the company reported that its same-store sales rose sharply in May, posting its fifth consecutive month of steep gains. Sales soared 56.9 percent in May, compared with a decline of 7.8 percent the year before. Overall sales totaled $40 million--which was 21.1 percent higher than $33 million a year ago, the company said.
