Negative Ad Feedback
June 6th, 2006 by admin
Negative comments happen. You know they do. No matter how hard we try to vett our ad copy and marketing speak, we will end up making someone laugh at us.
Of course, with RSS vanity searches (searching a search engine for your company’s name and subscribing to the RSS feed for constant updates) you can find out when people ridicule your company in real time.
If I see an ad for Acme Red Rubber Balls ("The Highest-Bouncing Rubber Balls in the World"), and I find that claim disingenuous, I might find one of their online ads, import it into Photoshop, and change the tagline to read "Acme: The Highest-Bouncing Balls Made of Stone in the World." I might post that ad to my blog to share it with some friends. Maybe we all have a laugh about it.
In the U.S., Acme would be well within its rights to sue me into next week. But we know where that path leads. When I get my legal nastygram, I’ll scan it in, post it to my blog and make the whole situation much worse for Acme. I’ll rant to anyone who will listen, claiming and abridgement of my free speech rights. Some people will disagree with me and a lot won’t. The result will be even more damage to Acme’s reputation–mostly because they can’t take a joke. There is an easier way, and it involves respect for the fact that people aren’t robots that think what advertisers tell them to think.
In the U.S., Acme would be well within its rights to sue me into next week. But we know where that path leads. When I get my legal nastygram, I’ll scan it in, post it to my blog and make the whole situation much worse for Acme. I’ll rant to anyone who will listen, claiming and abridgement of my free speech rights. Some people will disagree with me and a lot won’t. The result will be even more damage to Acme’s reputation–mostly because they can’t take a joke. There is an easier way, and it involves respect for the fact that people aren’t robots that think what advertisers tell them to think.
Take negativity with a grain of salt. If it were me, I’d laugh about it on my blog. The positive PR from this would be worth much more than I could ever squeeze from a libel suit.
Relevant Tags: advertising, marketing, negative advertising, online work, small business marketingPosted on Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at 8:03 pm In Work At Home, Work At Home Strategies