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!”.