My Nomination for Marketing Blunder of the Year

Last weekend McNeil PPC, maker of Motrin, launched a new ad campaign online that was designed to be highly targeted. In this first installment, they targeted moms who "wear" their babies.


If it wasn't obvious to you why that video created a firestorm that led McNeil to replace their video with an apology from the VP in charge of Marketing Motrin, do not try to target new parents ever. That segment would be perfect for a viral push, in fact this went viral real fast, and it is still going, but not in the way McNeil or their agency want.

The next step McNeil's advertiser took was to create a persona to match the ad on Twitter. http://twitter.com/motrinmoms was supposed to be "just a mom who likes her motrin. lol" This voice was so disengenuous that it was already defending itself by the third post, telling a baby ewaring blogger to "take a chill pill" for posting her outrage.

Finally, McNeill took over 24 hours to respond here, even though they had someone on twitter and people monitoring blogs who should have been able to do that for them as the bruhaha was building. ComputerWorld has a good article about all this, including expert opinion.

While many now are arguing that the outrage was unfounded and the mom's were whiney and humorless, and others are blaming McNeill PPC for the way they responded. I would rather look at where they responded.

They crafted this campaign carefully considering several angles, the one they missed was their audience. They were obviously prepared for an audience having fun but when they got the opposite they shut it all down, took down the website for 12 hours and then brought it back up without the video and with a poorly crafted letter from the vp of marketing on the home page of motrin.com. They disappeared for 12 hours while the outrage and honestly, shadenfreude, worked its way through the social networks. Why didn't @motrinmoms stay? Why did she decide to stick with defensive, when she could have turned it around and made it fun. What if she had turned on her own ad, "yeah, see what happens when a bunch of ad men come up with a 'sympathetic' appeal to new moms" include fewer lolz and more rollzeyes or something? Why not dump the campaign with that voice instead of just dumping the campaign? It would be no less risky, but you would have kept the voice for Twitter and other future campaigns.

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