Marketing Through Children: Recipe for Disaster
Actors have a maxim – never work with children or animals – they are too unpredictable and you cannot control the reaction or affinity of the audience to them. The same ought to be applied to the highly paid, marketing and ad men and women who literally work in glass houses! It has taken millions of ad dollars and quite a few embarrassing moments post-campaign launch before somebody had the gumption to voice the conclusion that maybe, this all wasn’t a good idea to bring with!
GM and McDonalds
In 2006, General Motors (GM) hooked up with McDonalds to give a toy Hummer away with every Happy Meal. Tens of thousands of replica Hummer’s were given away but there was an unexpected backlash against the campaign which adversely affected both McDonalds and GM.
The backlash was fuelled by revelations that the tie-in was a clear effort by GM to leverage sales from the parents of children through the McDonalds promotion.
A parent and consumer campaign was mounted which bombarded the McDonalds blog with adverse comments on the integrity of the company and moral perspective of using children for advertizing. McDonalds added fuel to the fire by only publishing positive comments and anyone with something bad to say, or who disagreed with the idea of using children for marketing the Hummer, found there comments never got published.
At this point, the campaign went viral – something every ad man dreams of creating but in this instance it was a nightmare. The negative aspect of the campaign caught consumer imagination as well as concerned parents and environmental groups who made sure that big bad business was manipulating poor little kiddly winks.
Hummer responded to the kids web page, HummerKids, it had created for the campaign with a slogan across the top, “Hey Kids! This is Advertizing!!”
Too little, too late.
What appeared on paper to be a good campaign to get the Hummer message across, just in time for the launch of the H3, turned out to be as popular as a Mad Cow Disease at a cookout.
McDonalds is still with us though reeling financially. GM was bailed out by the US taxpayer and is now owned by Italians who eschew the McDonalds burger for pizza, and poor Hummer is now owned by the Chinese as part of some corporate chow mein dish.
There’s a moral there but I think we’re all just best sticking with the acting maxim – don’t work with children or animals.
