Ryan
The Plan: Use viral marketing tactics and the element of user interactivity to allow people to create their own ads
The Story: General Motors had the brilliant idea of letting the public tinker with interactive software to make their very own ads online. Anyone who’s ever seen what happens to an unlocked marquee outside of a business should know right away why this is a bad idea, as letting anyone have carte blanche to say whatever they want about your product is not a good idea. In fact, it’s hard to imagine why GM thought this would turn out any better than it did.
Nonetheless, GM rolled out their campaign which let users pick video clips, soundtracks their own text-based messages to overlay on the finished product. Predictably, negative ads were produced by the boatload. People accused GM of contributing to global warming, of making poor quality vehicles or protested the war in Iraq. And those were the “good” ones. Other people chose the more “internet prankster” tack of simply lacing their commercials with obscenities.
GM’s bizarre response was to point out how the campaign was technically a success as they’d received millions of hits and most of the responses were in fact positive, while blindly ignoring the fact they’d received so many hits due to the sharing of the negative ads and no one was watching any of the so-called positive ones.
