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If you visit Taxi-nyc.com you won't find anything to clue you in that they are ground zero of one of the most breathtaking examples of how the balance of power between consumers and corporate America has shifted--thanks to social media.
No mea culpa. No apologies. No witty, pithy or even snarky promise of lessons learned.
Taxi-NYC is the agency that created the ill-fated Motrin Ad Campaign that so offended, so outraged its target audience--babywearing moms -- that there was a stampede to boycott the product. Not exactly the goal of most advertising campaigns. Since MOM 101is in advertising, her approach to blogging about the issue was to analyze why it was so offensive.
I'm actually feeling Motrin's own pain right now. They have an awesome
brand, a tried-and-true product, and a very smart idea at its core:
Motrin works on the pain that only mothers understand.What the campaign is missing is the love.
On Monday, November 24, 2008, a week after Motrin pulled the ad and apologized for it, I contacted Lisa Sanders, Taxi-NYC's Director of Corporate Communications to see if the agency would share their lessons learned.
She demurred with a "No comment." Sanders indicated that my request would be forwarded to J&J but she didn't spend any time asking exactly what my request was.
For an entire week, a firestorm swirled around the Motrin babywearing ad. J&J responded swiftly by taking down the ad and issuing an apology. But that doesn't answer the question, How did the ad get created and approved in the first place?
While crisis communication standards may advise that the ad agency hunker down and wait for the storm to pass,that is advice for an era past,---an era where social media didn't exist.
No one doubts the sincerity of J&J's apology. But I wasn't contacting the ad agency about an apology. I wanted to know what they learned from this experience and how they might change their creative process going forward. I wanted to know what advice they might give other agencies who find themselves in the center of a social media backlash.
But no one is talking, quite yet. This is not a question that Johnson & Johnson can answer. This is a question for the advertising agency and having a zipped lip is not helping matters.
The Motrin/babywearing Ad and the lightening swift reaction of bloggers and twitterers is an important story. BlogHers were all over it.
From Amy Gates at Crunchy Domestic Goddess to Don Mills Diva who asks, Chill Pill Anyone? and Chris MomathonBlog.com and RenaissanceTrophyMom who shares " Hell Hath No Fury Like a Blogging Mom On Twitter and YouTube,"and Zchamu who writes "Motringate: The ad wasn't the issue. Motrin just didn't listen."
As BlogHer Chief Operating Officer Elisa Camahort said when I asked her about the situation,
"This was an incredibly impressive display of the power social media holds for both customers *and* companies. Women raised their voices individually, then together, to articulate their intense feelings about an ad. And the company was able to listen to those voices, assess the situation and take direct and immediate action. All in 48 hours over a weekend! I have never seen anything like it in my life!"
Last Sunday, Joyce Schwarz who blogs at Hollywood2020.net decided to focus on the creators of the spot. She learned that Taxi just won the $18 million account around August. That means the agency had about 8 weeks to research, develop and create the ad campaign.
Schwartz also was able to reach the agency's Director of Corporate Communications who at the time -- Monday morning-- indicated she had no idea that anyone on Twitter was talking about the spot.
Joyce spent the next 10 minutes updating Sanders about the controversy as a professional courtesy and explaining what was happening on Twitter.com --2000 posts.
Schwarz walked Lisa Sanders through the posts online She asked when Schwarz needed a comment and Joyce said she was posting the blog about this call right now. Schwarz said as soon as possible. At 12:25 p.m PST Sanders called Schwarz back and on the record said, "We’re doing our research on
