Cellulite, Palm Oil and Orang-utans? Why Social Media and Over-Regulation Doesn’t Mix

Nutella, the famous Italian chocolate spread and chocolate sweets manufacturer is currently in a lot of PR hot water in France at the moment.  It’s an amazing example of how not only to completely cock-up your social media campaign, but to actually damage your brand as well. 

The concept of their "Say it with Nutella" campaign was pretty simple.  Nutella decided that for PR purposes, they would make a small web-based application where you could type in your name, and it would display a picture of a Nutella pot with your name on instead of the brand name.  You could then post it all over the web to your heart’s content, secure in the knowledge that everyone would know how much you love the chocolate and hazelnut goodness.  This had already been done in Italy with great success.  

A gif containing a set of some banned
words thanks to Rue 89.  Apologies
to the easily offended souls out there!

Of course, when you release something into the wild, you have to accept that a small minority of people are going to try and subvert it.  Just think of the Nike ID campaign where you could get your name embroidered onto your trainers: an MIT Student caused Nike huge amounts of negative publicity by asking for 'sweatshop' instead of a name, and went public with the back and forth emails when Nike refused.  And as a rule, the internet is far worse for this.  Nutella seem to have been aware of the danger, and took steps to protect themselves.  Thus people who tried type in something not entirely wholesome got a 'this word is not allowed' message.  Except, more and more people kept experiencing this, way above what would normally be expected, and some really weird words seemed to be banned.

At which point, someone technologically savvy went into the code to investigate what was restricted.  With a little bit of ingenuity, they managed to pull the full list of blocked words.  From my perspective, there were four groups:

1. Obscenities: this is actually relatively morally defensible as a majority of Nutella’s key audience are probably under 18 or buying on behalf of children who have access to social media.
2. Trademarks, such as 'Coca Cola' or 'Microsoft': again, reasonable on legal grounds because theoretically Nutella could be seen in breach of copyright should the images be spread on social media.
3. Words which could be theoretically be used to contravene the French laws on hate speech, especially the 1990 Gayssot Act, which includes a five year fine for holocaust denial, and criminal penalties for defamation based on race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or any handicap .  For Nutella this meant banning words such as 'Hitler', 'Muslim', 'Judaism' and 'Lesbian' (but not 'gay' strangely).  Whilst the fact you can't put 'Jew' onto a image of Nutella jar has been picked up by the British media and decried as evidence of discrimination, it is almost a direct lift from the legislation and is defensible, if ill-judged. 
4. And finally, what can only be dubbed as the “Oh God we hope no-one brings these up” topics, and include things like ‘obesity’, ‘fat’, ‘palm oil’, and ‘orang-utan’.  And this is the major cock-up because you cannot justify censorship based on paranoia of your own working practices.  Nutella have listed and blocked every topic where they feel vulnerable, and these exact topics have been distributed all over social media.  It’s like the classic joke when someone tells you not to think about elephants and suddenly all you can think about are grey pachyderms, except this herd is going to stomp all over your brand equity.  

So now on social media, there are a lot of questions.  Why is Nutella so worried about palm oil?  What are they doing over in Borneo/Indonesia?  Are they deliberately destroying rainforest areas for their plantations?  Is it more likely to cause obesity than other chocolate spreads?  To make the situation worse for the company, the current French internet game of the month seems to be to try and get around the restrictions.  Maybe you can’t do Orang-utan, but what about Oran-gutan?  Or Oranutan?  And once people manage a work around, they post it proudly on social media, reinforcing the message and linking Nutella obesity and rainforest destruction as well as more swear words than you can count.  

The problem for Nutella is that the internet is a realm of looser of societal rules.  Whilst no-one would consider breaking into an office to rifle through a computer to look at concept artwork for a campaign, anything on the internet is seen as fair game.  You can’t put restrictions on anything beyond the bare minimum because whatever you do will be publicly scrutinised so has to be defensible, and there are a lot of people out there better at programming than your average corporate web department.    

This fiasco illustrates some very basic rules of online marketing:

• If you are going to use something, you need to have a basic understanding the technology and its limitations.  I'm pretty sure that had Nutella realised that it was even possible to get the full list, they wouldn't have done it. 
• Expect anything interactive you put onto the web to be potentially subverted by a small minority and don’t panic when it happens.
• Keep a level of perspective.  So what if a couple of people write ‘Obesity’ on an image and post it on Facebook?  It would be gone from most people’s feeds in an hour and be forgotten.    
• There is a skill in dealing with ‘hecklers’ with a modicum of grace: if you can do so, generally these things are over quickly and don’t affect your core audience.  In other words, keep your cool.  One or two images with a comment on palm oil aren't going to put off your standard consumer.  Sadly, people have a level of unconscious blindness over things they don’t want to see when it involves giving up something they want: see things like Climate Change vs car use, or the demand for meat over conditions in battery farms.    
• And the cardinal rule: if you can’t defend something, don’t put it on the internet.

In the almost-words of the infamous 1980s TV advert; “Ah, Mr Ambassador, you are really spoiling the jungle with your Orang-utan murdering, obesity-causing treat!”.

Sky/Game of Thrones: How to do an Social Media Enhanced Exhibit in Three Easy Steps

Last week, I went to the Game of Thrones exhibition in London at the O2.  

Put on by Sky for fans of the show, it contained props and costumes from the series, as well as interactive exhibits, such as a VR experience to climb the Wall.  Ostensibly, it was a reward for subscribers to Sky and to create a positive ‘buzz’ around the new series.  As someone who went, it was great: we got to geek out over banners from the show, heft a giant great sword , play with some interactive exhibits and have an interesting evening. 

I overheard people in the crowd asking why Sky had done it.  Now the O2 isn’t cheap to hire, advertising the exhibition would not have been low cost, there were a large number of staff involved, and Sky didn’t even charge for the tickets. 

So why did they do it?   

Well, much as I’m sure Sky would like to be seen as philanthropic and value driven, it was less to do with creating a reward for loyal customers, and everything to do with some very clever social and viral marketing. 

The key things they did were:

1. Create high level of prestige for visits
2. Encourage loyalty and participation in visitors
3. Massively encourage viral/social media sharing of the exhibition.

So how did they do this?

1.  High Prestige for Visits

First off, they offered limited numbers of tickets.  Restriction in supply often leads to a higher perceived value on your basic supply and demand.  This came with a specific and publicised date for booking in the same way as high demand/high cost events such as concerts, creating a mental association of high cost.  And the process of having to struggle to get a ticket automatically makes it more valuable – the endorphins of competition definitely play a role!   

Timed visits also meant that the exhibition was never empty, and there were always queues outside as you waited for a time slot, again re-emphasising the value of the visit and seeming wanted.  You never had quiet patches.

Venue-wise, the exhibition was staged in the O2, a high reputation venue which hosts expensive shows, again priming that perception.  It didn’t need to be there as the exhibition was actually fairly small comparatively and in a side suite of rooms rather than in one of the halls, but the expectation was impressive.

2.  Encourage loyalty and participation in visitors

When you arrived at the venue, you needed to queue.  Our slot was at 8pm, but we didn’t go in for a while.  Whilst queuing, a staff member came up and got you to register on a website on their iPad.  This gave you a unique code to use in the exhibition, and a login to a unique page just for you that had audio guides and information on some of the exhibits.   

Now it's worth noting that not only did you have to register your details, but you had to choose a faction from the story during the process, automatically creating an involvement in the exhibition.  The feeling of being special was enhanced further by having an 'in character' message from the head of your faction on your personalised page, thanking you for your loyalty.  

Each time you accessed your page during the exhibition, your name was shown with a welcome message, as well as your faction allegiance. 

3.       Massively encourage viral/social media sharing of the exhibition.

The set-up of the exhibition very much encouraged sharing.  To start with, visitors were all carrying their smartphones already to look at the information on the exhibits as per the registration mentioned above.  So they were looking at something they find interesting, with a smartphone in their hand, with the camera pointed in the right direction.  Pretty cunning!

There were deliberate set up photo opportunities as well – for example there was a statue of one of the antagonists with a sign/call to action “have a selfie with a White Walker”: less people would have done it without instruction, but I bet it was one of the most shared sets of photos on social media once the idea was planted.  

Additionally, Sky must have done a lot of market research to work out what the key ‘triggers’ were for their customers that would make them want to post about their experience, and then designed interactive experiences that could be shared in different formats. 

There were three main ones that stuck out:

• Video: Get flamed by dragon fire – this was a 4 second video against green screen where you could be ‘flamed’ by a dragon with directions and taken by the staff there on professional cameras. 
• Images: Get made into a ‘white walker’ – they took a couple of professional photos of you in front of a green screen, and then transformed them into one of the series antagonists using basic photoshop.
• Own photo share: Photo on the key prop (‘The Iron Throne’) – there was a replica of the Iron Throne by the exit with good lighting available for own photos, and you had to queue past it to get out.  This was guaranteed to work as a lot of the print advertising was various actors from the series sitting on the throne with a caption on who would own it: pretty much anyone who went would have wanted a photo on it.

Options 1 and 2 were not simple: they needed trained staff to run the cameras and sets, and they had a number of audio-visual professionals behind the scenes doing the editing work in near real time, as the output appeared within 5 minutes.  However, these were some of the most popular exhibits with a minimum of a 10 minute wait on all of them.

This meant you saw the videos/images whilst you were still in the exhibition surrounded by the excitement and positive vibes created by the high prestige feelings.  Not only that, but they were uploaded onto your personal page from the registration with ‘share’ options.  This means the organisers could (and will) monitor social media, so can track exactly how many shares were put forward and on what format.   Remember there was a chunk of queuing at a number of places (which must have been calculated as they had time slots), so a lot of people had their phones in hand from earlier, and therefore shared the videos and photos whilst waiting out of partial boredom. 

Did it work?

My photo on the Iron Throne.

Had to be done, and yes,

it was shared on Facebook

So we have an exhibition which created feelings of being special within the audience, gave feelings of belonging to an select group, and offered high value social media content (which they could track), whilst making people wait around with their phones in hand. 

I'd say an unequivocal yes.  Despite the costs involved in the exhibition, their return on investment in terms of social advertising must have been enormous.  

Someone should definitely buy their marketing department a box of doughnuts!