DailyDirt: Advertising Needs To Be More Considerate

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Advertising is a tricky business. Content producers can be as thoughtful and careful as they think they can be, and they can still make mistakes, really, really bad mistakes sometimes. Audiences everywhere are ready to jump on an ad that wastes their precious time or misleads them or offends some sensibility. But it's not always (ever?) easy to make content that is both compelling and also good for selling widgets (or promoting a message). Check out a few of these links on advertising campaigns gone a bit wrong.

• Best Buy wrote a playful tweet about having everything you need in its stores -- except a payphone, referring to the Serial podcast about a murder case and an unaccounted for payphone near a Best Buy store that might have exonerated a teen accused of murder. Best Buy apologized for making light of the topic since there was a backlash from people who thought it was inappropriate to joke about such a serious subject. [url]
• Greenpeace wanted to promote renewable energy with a huge banner, and unfortunately, it placed its message on the site of the Nazca Lines -- a 1,500-year-old ancient monument in Peru. Greenpeace will likely be charged criminally for defacing a heritage site with a tone-deaf advertisement that ignored the local population completely. [url]
• Sesame Street also tweeted a mildly humorous joke about Serial. However, the children's TV show didn't provoke much backlash for making a pun related to a murder case. Not-for-profit muppets aren't apparently held to the same standards as retailers, but then again, Bert didn't actually refer to anything specific in the murder case. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: ads, advertising, content, media, mistakes, nazca lines, podcast, serial, sesame street
Companies: best buy, greenpeace