Thursday, May 14, 2009

Angry applicants attack Doritos

B&T: Furious competition applicants have attacked FMCG brand Doritos over the handling of its ‘You make it, we play it’ ad promotion. Online forums, including Doritos’ YouTube site, have been inundated with comments from angry applicants claiming that they were unable to submit their ads due to a frequently crashing competition website.
One comment on the YouTube site read: “A lot of us have been robbed of the chance to compete in a fair competition.”


Doritos, I told you you were fucked. Thanks for over delivering.
Bashing post 1
Bashing post 2

Exploitation of poor souls trying to get their 15 inches of fame. Not cool Doritos, not cool.
If you don’t set up proper management systems, to handle the influx of content, what’s the point? 2,000 videos is a bit of a shitload, considering the US version got 5,000. Makes our participation stats a whole lot higher, but not very cool when you forget about the people who matter the most- the audience.

It makes me sad to know that these campaign planners come up with all these ideas for the brand –

  • Let’s find the audience in the right channels and show them our ads
  • Let’s get the audience to make more ads. Make content for us, spread our message amongst their peer group
  • Then we’ll give some of our audience the fame they seek
  • And then we’ll not put any effort into receiving the content, making sure our audience is actually looked after when they put in effort to contribute to our brand.

I feel sorry for the people who put in such effort. Forget that this is bad for the campaign, what about all the UGC activations in the future? Shame on you Clemenger BBDO for giving all advertisers a bad name.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a bigger and more common issue than companies realize.

Like JetStar’s 5c sale-fail, creating demand and failing to meet it is worse than no marketing whatsoever. Doritos digital producers failed to meet demand, whose fault is that?

But how detrimental to the product itself can this be? I can’t see it being any more harmful to a corn chip than the mono sodium glutamate its dusted with.

wisey said...

I'm not so sure about that Returnon. There is a trickle down effect and you may find that this does indeed affect sales.

And very nice usage of mono sodium glutamate.

Anonymous said...

True. Best not to underestimate the subtle social machinations of the online community. Every thwarted applicant would be a vector for bad word of mouth.

If I were inclined to participate in a UGC campaign, I would have serious reservations about going to the trouble for Doritos after this. I'm also undecided on the mutual benefit between user and brand, given the ROI companies get on these UGC campaigns. Great for the winner, but every other submission is free content that also promotes the brand.

I wonder whether a user's day of reckoning is far off in the future, when participant's skepticism for UGC campaigns renders them ineffective. There must be a threshold of submissions and general participation for a UGC campaign to make ROI. The Doritos campaign may have brought that day of reckoning a little closer.