Have you heard about Motrin Moms? On November 16, Motrin released a commercial suggesting that baby carriers are both painful and unfashionable. Check it out below.
What probably seemed clever in the mind of a 23-year-old, childless copywriter turned out to be quite offensive to many moms (and dads, to be sure) and unleashed a social media firestorm.
Within a few short hours, a movement was born, complete with its own #motrinmoms hashtag on Twitter, angry blog posts, video rants, CafePress stores, Flickr groups and parody videos. In less than a day, Motrin was forced to take down the ad and apologize.
- Morriss Partee has published a chronology of events.
- Enterprise Social Media has assembled a Harpers-like index of Motrin Moms activity, which also gives a good sense of how quickly, from Motrin’s point of view, this whole thing got out of hand.
- Jack Neff covers the incident in Ad Age.
Update:
My biz partner Dean Gulstad points out an article by Jakob Nielsen on participation inequality, which supports Neff’s view that Motrin acted too hastily in responding to the social media uproar. Nielsen points out that “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.” Therefore, he says, “If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.”
Yet another update:
Seth Godin pans Motrin’s apology for its lack of humanity.
November 25th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Per AdAge “The tone was intended to be real and lighthearted, but it came off as irreverent.”
I see this as a common mistake made by creative teams who aim for provocative but fail to recognize the value-set(s) of their customer. So you could chalk it up as just being a mediocre and perhaps offensive ad. (I have four kids and I thought it was offensive too – but I feel the same way about ads with women in high heels pushing vacuum cleaners around or making Lipton soup while the kids tear the house down. There may be as much room for growth in marketing to women as there is in understanding social media. But that’s another story.)
It is interesting how much dialogue this incidence is still generating and how much everyone is learning about social media. It’s definitely an interesting and fast moving target.
November 25th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Great points, Julie. Funny that there would be a gap in understanding when it comes to half the consumer population, but there it is. And, really, it’s not half the population. There are so many tribes (to use the latest Godinism) within… That’s why I was convinced that the ad was written by a young female copywriter…someone who came from a tribe that is perhaps more concerned with outer appearances…trying to speak to a tribe that doesn’t give a damn. The result was a tone-deaf attempt at empathy that came off as condescending.
You’d think that by now we’d be past advertising to sterotypes (vacumming in high heels? really?), the alternative – trying to understand different groups with different values – is really hard work.
November 25th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Well I think we could get in as much danger trying to id the copywriter as they were in their writing. I know young mothers who didn’t like this ad either – so who knows. I think it’s just that when creatives ‘provoke’ in order to break through that they need to be willing to do the work of understanding the values, especially now when the feedback happens at such break-neck speed. I can only imagine a potential shift from agency/corp driven messaging to a shared agency/corp/customer driven message.
December 10th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Good write up, and additional links. Thanks for the link to my summary too.