My husband's company recently ran an ad that some construed as offensive. The creator of the ad has done ads for them for about 20 years, and has considerable creative license, and therefore my husband--who is technically responsible for their ads--never saw it before it ran. It was published several days ago, and I hadn't heard much about it, but then last night there was a news story on local TV, and today people are tweeting about it and ranting about it on Facebook. My poor husband is very stressed about it--people are calling to yell at him--and it's stressing me out too! As if I didn't have enough things to stress about...
So my natural release is to post on my Carlson IT blog, right? Well, it certainly touches on some of the points that our IT Management class is trying to get at. You mean something for one audience but it can quickly and easily get in front of lots of other people, who might not see the message you intended (the ad was supposed to be funny, but of a certain type of humor; the writer is a wonderful person and did not mean to offend).
On the other hand, any forum where people complain is also available to make apologies and explanations, which is what the company has been doing. I checked out their Facebook fan page, and it seemed to me that there were as many people defending the business as there were condemning it. And, as one commenter noted, many people had become fans of the business simply so they could complain.
So, we worry about what effects all of this publicity will have on business, but I'm trying to be reassured by the adage that "no news is bad news." We'll see what effect, if any, there is. I think there are still 2 more lessons here: one, that it probably seems like more people are "talking" about it than actually are, because you can "hear" more of them; and, two, that it may disappear as quickly as it started. We have pretty short attention spans these days.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment