Monday, February 16, 2009

The World's Worst Naked Viral



If anyone hasn't seen this story from Australia it is a stark reminder that you need to be open and honest in all your communications. 

Naked Communications recorded a video for fashion brand Witchery, featuring an actress who claimed to be trying to find the man of her dreams who had left his (Witchery) jacket in a cafe, and put it on YouTube. 

It quickly became the most talked about stunt, but for all the wrong reasons. It suffered a backlash from social media commentators who opposed the deception involved in the campaign. Rather than stop they produced a second video and kept going....until Naked’s CEO in Australia, Mat Baxter, quit last week.

There entire saga moved at such a fast pace and there were plenty of twists along the way – first denials, then admissions, then defence of the stunt and finally more finger pointing. 

Naked said it was all fun and harmless, but the bottom line is that people don’t enjoy being lied too.The last straw was when 

The Australian’s Wish magazine published a full page advertisement from Naked for Witchery naming the journalists that had been fooled into writing about the stunt. Salt to the wound?

Further proof that you need specialist advice to play in the social media space.







3 comments:

Panos said...

Amazing "case study"...

To tell you the truth, I thought the campaign was excellent. They just needed to find a way, not to fool audiences.

Not easy, with a concept like that. Couldn't work otherwise I guess.

But at the end of the day, I guess all publicity is good publicity.

willson said...

Interesting… I might try some of this on my blog, too. It’s quite interesting how you sometimes stop being innovative and just go for an accepted solution without actually trying to improve it… you make a couple of good points.
online marketing

buy kamagra said...

Awesome campaign, the fact that she is gorgeous helps a lot with the popularity.