At the risk of sounding like a reading report after talking a couple of days ago about something I’d read in Marketing Magazine’s January issue, I hit another gob-smacker today in the February issue.
Graham Kelly, creative integrator at TBWA (Singapore) was talking about their campaign for telco M1. They created a fake cheesy 80s duo, Connexion, and made up a story about how they’d had a hit song in Belgium titled ‘Ring Ring’.
Phase one of the campaign was a music video, an 80’s ad for Cougar Sweatbands featuring the duo, a cheesy Belgian TV talkshow interview, a tacky website, a Wikipedia entry and MySpace and Facebook profiles.
Is it just me not having a sense of humour, or is the idea of planting advertising support on Wikipedia something that Graham really should NOT be proud of?
No problems with the creativity of the campaign TBWA, but the tactics suck and really you reinforce all the negative stereotypes associated with advertisers trying to mess around in social media. The fact that you don’t know that there are are scores of people around the world who are kept busy keeping slugs like you OUT of Wikipedia, and that the millions of users who use it as a resource are grateful that they do, is just showing your stunningly gross ignorance.
And Graham… to brag to the media about how clever it is? Really shameful!
