A Cannes Lion for Racism! Who knew!
While this isn’t a game, it’s definately viral, and since it took one of the top prizes for Cannes Interactive, it deserves to be mentioned. It’s for a Brasilian Glue. What the gentleman geniuses (or is it genii?) at DDB down south did was use the glue to stick a monitor to the wall. Then they put a webcam on the wall facing it, and hooked it all together via a website. The result is that you type something, and see it on the monitor! Simple. Cool. But now we get to the dangerous part.
In 3 minutes of watching it, about half of the messages on the screen involved bad things being said about various countries (”I HATE USA” then “F*** BRAZIL”), and the other half included various curse words that were able to sneak by the built-in, but not very robust, censor. Freedom of speech in marketing = danger! Another great one that popped up on the screen as I left was: “YOU ALL S_CK!” The worst of all was the repeated use of the n-word.
I had several minutes of amusement (horror?) - definately. But I’d be worried about the effect that all the garbage messages being put on the screen are going to have on the brand. They might stick like crazy glue. Nyuk nyuk.
This entry was posted on Monday, July 4th, 2005 at 11:14 am and is filed under Branding, Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 4th
2005 at 1:31 pm
Well I didn’t see any cursing or country bashing when I just took a look at it, but I did see some funny bits of conversations as various people wrote sentences 3-4 words at a time.
I actually think this is working out well for the glue company. Sure, there’s going to be some bad apples saying bad things, but they’re driving traffic, and if they can keep that traffic sustained think about the message in a few months. . .everyone will see the monitor that’s been glued to the wall for 100’s of days.
Now THAT will sell super glue.