No such thing as bad publicity

No such thing as bad publicity

While there have been many horror stories about how damaging negative publicity can spiral out control there is a school of thought that says any publicity is good publicity. The fact that your business is getting any media attention (albeit negative) is good as it raises you profile and is better than not being talked about.

I work for Empica PR and we have been involved in managing publicity for a controversial ad campaign by the heath and fitness club at Cadbury House. With so many people wanting to lose weight following the festive period theclub's marketing agency launched an integrated campaign in the first weeks of January to inspire people to join. It focused on an image of an alien with the tag line 'When the aliens come they will eat the fatties first' and was used across newspaper advertising, banners, leaflets and poster sites.

From a PR perspective we at Empica recognised this issue could be controversial though we could not predict exactly how it would unfold. We were keen to create discussion to increase exposure for the campaign. As it happened several people complained about the ad being offensive and discriminatory to over-weight people. The local press picked up on the complaints and carried our official statement from Cadbury House telling our side of the story and how it was meant in good humour – although with shock tactics aimed at those who had over-indulged at Christmas.

Often when a negative story appears the PR agency works hard to keep coverage to a minimum, in this case we positively encouraged it to snowball. It appeared in the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and on BBC radio. Now we had a story running we used online techniques to encourage debates about the pros and cons of the advert with bloggers. At this point we were being contacted by Sci-fi sites in the USA and gym manager Jason Eaton was even interviewed on Australian radio station, 4BC!

The ad campaign sparked one complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority – who dismissed it out of hand; most people joined the debate taking the advertisement as it was intended – as a piece of good natured humour. There were hundreds of comments online with people expressing there opinions. Our stance was it certainly was not meant to offend and the fact it features an Alien shows it was tongue-in-cheek.

As part of the overall strategy I also launched a social media strategy involving Twitter and Facebook to maximise publicity online. Part of this included a competition over Twitter where they gave away free memberships to the first 25 retweeters. The memberships went within the hour.

Social media gave this campaign a whole new dimension and certainly assisted the propagation of it worldwide. It provided another avenue for people to share their opinions about the issue and contribute to the discussion. Although certain aspects of the campaign were planned, we believe the real value of social media is to act fast and take advantage of opportunities.

This campaign is still growing and evolving. An initial seed was sown resulting in some negative publicity but the story continues to provide 'food for thought' as you can see from the video below.

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