Abstract
Marketing and advertising are two important aspects of managing a business, or to be more specific, of leading a business towards success. A product or a service offering may be good or even of the highest quality when compared to those that the competitions in the industry offer but if the marketing and advertising strategies used are not effective or not suitable to the target market, or in some cases, simply do not work the way how they are supposed to, then the actual sales and profitability or the company’s product or service may not reach the expectations . The objective of this paper is to identify, research, and discuss three media campaigns that have gone wrong, explain the factors that contributed to the end result, and discus what improvements could have been made to prevent the outcome.
Introduction
The secret of the manufacturers and distributors of those products most likely lies on good and effective marketing and advertising campaigns and strategies. One of the proven and effective ways of marketing and advertising a product or service, often for the purposes of boosting sales and profitability, is through the use of a suitable media campaign . A media campaign can be described as a special project or operation conducted by an individual or in corporate and for profit settings, by a group of individuals, to market and or advertise a certain product or service. This is often done in an effort to boost the product or service’s visibility to the target markets. It may also be said that media campaigns are done to increase the likelihood that more customers would buy the product or subscribe to the service being offered .
The main distinct feature of a media campaign that sets it apart from other marketing and advertising strategies is the fact that in a media campaign, the marketing or advertising company uses a wide range of media or in some cases, mass media-related materials . It is worthwhile to note that the mass media materials can either be and strategies can either be done online or offline. In the case of non-digital forms of marketing, for example, the marketing or advertising company may opt to use magazines, newspapers, and other paper-based publications to get their marketing and advertising messages and points across their target markets.
There are also digital forms of marketing and advertising, as in the case of electronic mail and internet marketing, which is where the current trend in the field of marketing and advertising is actually going. What is important to remember about these media campaigns, be it digitalized or non-digitalized, is that there is no one hundred percent guarantee that they would work the way they are expected to work. At some point, there will be setbacks that may be brought about by unexpected situations or any undisclosed factors, among other things that the media campaign planners may have missed or taken for granted. The important thing to end up winning, according to literatures, is to be able to identify what works and what does not work, and from that ability to identify, choose only those that work and eliminate all the others that do not . From this information, it can be inferred that there should be a significant number of botched up mass media campaigns out there.
- The JP Morgan “Ask JPM” Hash Tag
Using social media sites to market and advertise a company’s products and or services may be a good idea. After all, Twitter enables a domestic company to access a wide array of social media services that would eventually be exposed to potentially billions of people not just around the neighborhood or municipality where the poster, marketer, or advertiser lives (as in the case of traditional and non-digitalized media campaign strategies that the entire industry has already outlived) but to an entire worldwide network of users of the social media platform—which in this case is Twitter.
There are other social media platforms that for profit organizations like JP Morgan in the current case can take advantage of like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. What most companies do is that they establish official accounts in either one or all of the most commonly used social media platforms and use their official accounts to post announcements about a new or upcoming product or service offering, keep their customers informed about unusual announcements from the company, and to basically communicate. All in all, the use of these social media platforms has dramatically changed the dynamics of and the way how the entire marketing and advertising industry behaves. Last year, JP Morgan got involved in one of the most popular failed attempt to conduct a rather ambitious media campaign on one of the most popular and commonly used social media platform that we just mentioned—Twitter. The botched up media campaign attempt was eventually tagged as a snarkpocalypse which pertains to disastrous comments posted about a company or an individual that has an official account in a social media platform, often coming from unsatisfied and disgruntled stakeholders.
Between the third and fourth quarter of the year 2013, JP Morgan, one of the largest investment and consumer banks in the United States and in the world economy, surprisingly launched a media campaign using Twitter. The goal of the media campaign was to invite users of the said social media platform, which number in millions by the way, to send comments, questions, and basically any general concerns that do not involve the sharing of personal banking and investment account-related information, to a JP Morgan executive using the hash tag “Ask JPM”.
The announcement was delivered via the same social media platform using the company’s officially managed Twitter account. The twitter users’ response was something that the JP Morgan media campaign management team may have not expected. Within the next couple of hours, thousands of twitter users responded with a wild stream of negative comments and remarks, memes, among other negative things that could be liberally thrown at someone or a group via the social media platform.
Within a mere six hour period, there were more than 8,000 responses that contained the assigned hash tag, majority of which, according to Twitter website analytic reports and social media tracking service company Topsy, were negative comments and jokes . To be more exact, about the rate of negative comments—which were not the main point of the Twitter campaign by the way, was two out of three. The fundamental purpose of the media campaign was to enable students and twitter users to communicate with Jimmy Lee, one of the international bank’s most senior executives and senior bankers regarding JP Morgan’s most recent affairs. The said campaign was supposed to be followed up by a question and answer portion to be held after a couple of days of information gathering—from Twitter users. However, after being overwhelmed by the number of negative comments, some of which were offensive, obscene, and abusive, the JP Morgan management decided to cancel the event saying that the premature and unplanned launch of the Twitter media campaign was a bad idea after all.
The question now would be what appeared to be the problem, and why did the large stream of negative comments happen in the first place? It appears that the problem was something internal to JP Morgan’s management. A few months before the said media campaign disaster, JP Morgan got involved in a court case for allegedly intentionally selling mortgage-backed securities; something which they knew would eventually drop in value, to unsuspecting investors.
The court case settlement about such issue was worth 13 billion USD. JP Morgan was accused of directly misleading their investors to highly overpriced investment vehicles, something which the JP Morgan management opposed. Another issue that may have contributed to the huge stream of negative comments about the company that was delivered via their media campaign was the bank’s involvement in the London Whale trading which incurred the company a loss of 6 billion USD for the settlement of the case. In this case, there was nothing that JP Morgan could do to stop the stream of comments; the best thing that they did was they mitigated; that is, they minimized the effects of the botched up media campaign on the company.
2. The McDonald Stories
In 2012, Twitter was the only social media platform that has the hash tag feature. Basically, the hash tag feature allows users to funnel the posts, responses, and comments of other users onto a certain hash tag, allowing them to analyze how well the social media platform community has responded to their campaign (hash tags are often used as mass media campaign strategies by companies, even the large ones, these days). Another purpose of the hash tag feature is to increase the visibility of the company to the users of the platform on the other users of the platform and even non-users because apparently, the hash tags may also be located using search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and Google, among others.
All in all, it has a great potential to be an effective online marketing and advertising tool. Indeed the big players in different industries were able to quickly grasp the concept and idea of using Twitter hash tags which leads to the current case of a media campaign disaster involving the multinational fast food store giant, McDonalds. What JP Morgan experienced in 2013 appears to have been the same experience encountered by McDonalds in 2012. In January 2012, McDonalds launched a similar media campaign using Twitter as their primary message, remark, and comment delivery system. In the company’s instructional tweet, it said that they were going to use the hash tag McDStories to ask users to share their positive dining experiences at McDonald’s restaurants and branches.
After just about two hours, the company started to receive comments and jokes about how the food at McDonald’s was so salty; how the company silently promotes obesity; and how the food at some of their branches tasted like dog foods, among other negative comments and or remarks thrown at them using the said hash tag as the funneling mechanism to direct the responses towards McDonalds. What could have been an ongoing media campaign for McDonald’s was shut down in just a couple of hours when the higher management advised the social media team handling the company’s official twitter account to just let the campaign go. However, it is worthwhile to note that even after the account manager’s official announcement which was also delivered using the company’s official Twitter account, the users were still tweeting jokes and insults about McDonald’s using the then already abandoned hash tag for some weeks after the date it was removed.
The McDStories campaign failed mainly because there was no regulatory or filtering mechanism that stopped the target markets from responding negatively, abusively, and in a badgering manner to the marketing and advertisement efforts posted by the company. It would have been more successful if the company just posted a simple tweet about how the customers enjoy its restaurants and the food they sell. That way, they would not have to rely on the customers’ comments for the content of their marketing or advertising piece. Sure, the other users can comment but it would not be as bad as what happened with their hash tag campaign.
3. The Chrysler F-Bomb Campaign
Chrysler is one of the most established American car auto-makers. It has numerous branches and dealerships worldwide, which is evidence that it is one of the biggest players in the industry, both based on revenues and market share. One strategy that automobile manufacturers use for advertising and marketing is their badge. A lot of car manufacturers, in the past decades, have, for numerous times, changed their badges. It only makes sense because after all, the first thing that can be seen from the car apart from the headlights and the front grill is the badge. Make an eye-catching badge and then people may start purchasing the company’s cars for its eye-catching badges. The same is true for Chrysler.
Recently it launched a new car badge that indirectly says that all of its cars are imported from Detroit, a state which is also known for its other name, Motor City, mainly because it houses numerous big players in the worldwide automobile industry such as Chrysler, General Motors, Ford, among others. The ad was nothing short of eye-catching and spectacular because it entails the essence of having a car that has been manufactured and assembled in the Motor City. However, one advertisement post of one of Chrysler’s marketing and advertising department’s associates posted something about how ironic he found that Detroit is known as the Motor City yet no one there knows how to (insert the obscene f-word here) drive. The associate that wrote the remark on a public website was immediately fired and Chrysler apologized.
The problem here may be identified as the lack of education that Chrysler gave to their associates about the purpose of the ad, about how each member of the marketing and advertising department should be consistent with whatever they are posting or shouting about in their media campaign blurbs and statements. After all, sincerity and integrity matters in the marketing and advertising industry and without these two, a media campaign would most likely fail. However, this may be considered as an isolated case. But still, it would not have hurt if the company had the due diligence to fully orient their associates and other members of the team about the goals, and especially the dos and don’ts when they launched the said media campaign, apparently using the company’s new badge as the centerpiece and the following newspaper and mass media posts as reinforcements.
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