Marketing Gone Wrong: Ad Agency Loses 2 Coca-Cola Accounts with 1 Porn Reference

Slick idea – Just a slight “oops” that has caused Coca-Cola to consider dropping the ad agency Lean Mean Fighting Machine after posting a pornographic movie reference on a 14yr. old’s Facebook status.

The ad campaign worked like this: Users allowed the Dr. Pepper Facebook app to take over the user’s status updates to post “embarrassing” updates like “Did the guy in the car next to me catch me digging in my nose?” (I just made that one up) in order to win money. It seemed to be popular too as approximately 160,000 users signed up to have their FB status boxes taken over by Dr. Pepper and seen by ALL their friends and so on. That equals a ton of exposure for the Dr. Pepper Brand from THE social networking site.

Well, it all went downhill for the campaign, and seemingly the ad agency behind it after a parent just happened to be checking their daughter’s Facebook status and saw a reference to a popular and totally disgusting pornographic movie put there by Dr. Pepper (I’ll give you ONE guess which one it was). The parent proceeded to run it up the Coca-Cola flagpole and initially all she got in terms of an “our bad” from the company was some theater tickets and a overnight stay at fancy hotel. As you can imagine that wasn’t enough for the parent, so she took to a UK parent’s social networking site to air her grievances.

As a result, Coca-Cola has apologized, pulled the status takeover campaign, and is now discussing its relationship with the agency behind the campaign. That same ad agency recently landed a digital ad account for Coca-Cola’s Coke Zero brand. Now we can only imagine how much money Coca-Cola spends on advertising all over the world (Don’t bother, its in the neighborhood of $2.7 billion annually) Now imagine as an ad agency just getting a piece of that pie, only to possibly have the rug pulled out from under it over just one Facebook status update. To make matters worse, if they are dropped by Coca-Cola, the ad agency will have to do some serious reputation repair in order to get any meaningful clients with deep pockets like Coca-Cola.

Just goes to show how powerful social media advertising can be and potentially how much can be gained…or lost as the result of a successful, or catastrophic ad campaign.