This morning, Annie told me about a Motrin ad that a bunch of mom-bloggers were angry about because it was critical of babywearing. She was really upset about it, and convinced that it was an intentional slam on mothers. Since I work in marketing, and Annie majored in Sociology, we tend to have conversations like this where Annie says advertising is evil, and I try to defend it.
In this case, I told her that I doubted it was anything intentional, and that it was probably a case of design-by-committee. Still, I asked her to send me the link so I could check the video out, and figured it would be a good conversation starter at work. Once I watched the video, though, I was startled by how bad it was. I could easily see why people were offended, and as I dug around online to find the details, what emerged was a fascinating story about a big company whose attempt to brand with their target audience backfired badly, and forced them to cancel an entire ad campaign.
To make a long story short (check out this Advertising Age article for all the gory details), the video was posted on Motrin’s website a few weeks ago. Last weekend, at the end of International Babywearing Week, an incredible combination of outraged blog posts, Twitter users, and YouTube replies led to the entire site being pulled offline on Sunday. It was put back up on Monday with an apology.