An advertising campaign from Olla Condoms, which sends Facebook users unsolicited friend requests from their yet-to-be-born sons, has attracted plenty of attention — but is also a violation of Facebook policy.

The promo video (see below) for the “Unexpected Babies” campaign from Brazilian agency Age Isobar details the ad’s concept: Take a male user’s name, create a new profile using that name with “Jr.” tacked on the end, and send a friend request to the unsuspecting user. When he visits his virtual son’s profile, he sees a condom ad from Brazil-based Olla.

Facebook, however, expressly forbids fake profiles. The condom ad campaign appears to violate several policies found under “Registration and Account Security” in Facebook’s Terms. And Facebook’s Help Center even has a section to report fake accounts that “list a fake name” or “don’t represent a real person.”

While fake profiles can sometimes entertain, they more often than not lead to unwanted consequences. For example, earlier this year, one woman unsuccessfully used a fake profile to dig up dirt on her husband — and instead found herself in a fake-murder plot.

What do you think of Olla Condom’s ad campaign? Watch the video below and sound off in our poll.

Wow. Just wow.

The official Nivea statement reads: “After realizing that this ad is misleading, it was immediately withdrawn.” Really? It’s pretty disturbing that no one on the brand team realized that before launching it, much less when it was pitched to them by the moronic agency.

What is it going to take for brands and agencies to understand that there’s a vast difference between irreverent humor and idiotic, offensive, archaic thinking? Categorize this with Groupon’s Super Bowl spots.

A Nivea print ad encouraging African-American men to “re-civilize” themselves, now appearing in September’s issue of Esquire magazine, created a firestorm of tweets, Facebook updates and blog posts accusing the brand of racism.

Nivea took to its Facebook Page Thursday afternoon to issue an apology and thank fans for their concern. Parent company Beiersdorf AG withdrew the ad from future publication.

“Thank you for caring enough to give us your feedback about the recent ‘Re-civilized’ NIVEA FOR MEN ad. This ad was inappropriate and offensive,” Nivea said on Facebook. “It was never our intention to offend anyone, and for this we are deeply sorry. This ad will never be used again. Diversity and equal opportunity are crucial values of our company.”

The ad in question portrays an African-American man tossing out a mask of himself with a beard and afro-style hairdo. It reads, “Look like you give a damn,” and has the phrase “re-civilize yourself” bolded in all capital letters.

Bloggers, Twitter users and Facebook members took issue with the racial implications of the print ad.

“The message couldn’t be clearer: Natural hair on a black man isn’t a style preference or a nod to afrocentrism — it’s straight-up uncivilized,” GOOD Associate Editor Nona Willis Aronowitz wrote.

“Wonder what, if anything, @Rihanna will say about this as the face of #nivea,” fashion writer Septembre Anderson tweeted. Rihanna was chosen as the official spokeswoman for Nivea earlier this year. The caption on Anderson’s Twitpic photo reads, “Adding Nivea to the list of companies that will not be getting my money. Post-racial my ass.”

A separate ad featuring “a clean-shaven white guy getting ready to toss away his scraggly unshaven head and the words, ‘Sin City isn’t an excuse to look like hell,’” seemed to be overlooked in the midst of the social media uprising, according to AdAge.

Nivea parent company Beiersdorf AG shared the following longer statement with CNN:

“We are deeply sorry to anyone who may take offense to this specific local advertisement. After realizing that this ad is misleading, it was immediately withdrawn.

“Diversity and equal opportunity are crucial values of NIVEA: The brand represents diversity, tolerance, and equal opportunity. We value difference. Direct or indirect discrimination must be ruled out in all decisions by, and in all areas of our activities. This applies regardless of gender, age, race, skin color, religion, ideology, sexual orientation, or disability. Nor should cultural, ethnic, or national origin, and political or philosophical conviction be of any significance.”

Images courtesy of AdAge & GOOD

via mashable.com

August  8, 2011
iCrossing’s Live Media Studio to Turn Brands into Storytellers

@Hearst: What’s your view on the trend of brands acting more like publishers?

Tarah Feinberg: For a long time, we’ve lived in a world where brands engaged in marketing that was very one-way—it was, “This is our message. This is our product. This is what you should believe.” We now live in a world where we have much savvier consumers who have access to a wider range of information. Now CMOs know that they have to be content publishers in order to provide a higher value to their audiences other than information about their products. But the dilemma is that they’re having a really hard time building and managing a publishing operation because they’ve never done it before.

@Hearst: Given today’s digital media landscape, what role does real-time play in crafting content for a brand?

Feinberg: Real-time marketing boils down to understanding the needs of a brand and its audience at any given moment. We might broadcast different content in the morning than in the evening, on a Monday than we do on a Saturday. It’s about making sure that our client’s communications are always as relevant as possible. We can measure how the content is performing and take immediate feedback from the communities, which means that we are constantly improving the experiences on an ongoing basis.

@Hearst: What are clients hoping to achieve?

Feinberg: As a baseline, we know that we’re talking about products or services and selling something. But what brands are now looking to accomplish with the Live Media Studio is to build advocacy around their offerings in the marketplace so that they’re not just talking about themselves—they want the world talking about them. If a brand can compel someone to sing its praises, it’s been proven by research that that person’s social network is more likely to buy that product than if they just hear a message from the brand.

Tarah Feinberg

@Hearst: How will iCrossing’s partnership with Hearst influence the Live Media Studio?

Feinberg: We are very fortunate to be a part of Hearst because it allows us to leverage its state-of-the-art creative resources, including all of the in-house production capabilities and a network of freelance writers. Hearst has some amazing thought leaders in so many different categories, including fashion, automotive, and finance, which overlap with our client roster. When working with a publication, we can use archived content or co-create it with our clients.

iCrossing is disproportionately competitive compared to other agencies because of our partnership with Hearst. Virtually no one else in this space has the amazing mix of incredible content creation, editorial capabilities and marketing acumen. All of these aspects that Hearst specializes in have amplified our studio operations.

@Hearst: Tell me about your role as senior director of the Live Media Studio.

Feinberg: My outward-facing role is to convey the vision and the offerings that we are bringing to other departments at iCrossing, to Hearst properties, and to our clients so there’s a unified voice about the Live Media Studio. The other part of my role is to offer operational guidance, drive the creative product and help the studio continue to evolve its mission and value of content and communities.

@Hearst: What does the addition of the Live Media Studio suggest about iCrossing’s future?

Feinberg: It’s a natural evolution for the agency. The Live Media Studio shows how iCrossing has always been at the forefront of digital marketing. When the company was founded, we were really ahead of the curve for search—we were doing search marketing before Google was “Google.” We innovated in that area, but since then the digital space has progressed to more than that. And while our search and paid media offerings are still very strong, we’ve identified that the future of marketing is about using real-time and rich content that is rooted in a brand.

###

Watch a video of iCrossing leaders talking about the significance of their Live Media Studio.

Insightful post, as always, from David, but I felt the need to challenge it a bit. Here’s the comment I left on his blog, which appears below my comment.

Do you really think [Google+] won’t matter? I agree that it’s getting flooded far faster than any social network before, but isn’t that largely because people now understand what a social network is and why they want one better than they have before? That does not mean that they’ll decide they want ANOTHER one, or this one, by any means, but I do think that Google+ has launched with the most intuitive privacy and content filtering system I’ve seen to date. When I think about the concerns and gripes that the masses have with platforms like Facebook, this feature, which is essentially the first way that new users interface with Plus, just might make it that much more attractive to them. You and I both know that another social network isn’t going to be the future, but there’s a huge value in the contextualization of social data…and making sense of massive amounts of data is something that Google seems to be good at. So, while I’m not about to talk about anything being a something-killer, cause that’s just silly, I’m also not ready to say it doesn’t matter yet.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

« Why Google+ Matters | Main

July 12, 2011

Why Google+ Doesn’t Matter

Why Google+ Doesn’t Matter”
Originally published in MediaPost’s Social Media Insider
Find me on Google+ here, and read the Google+ FAQ

Google+ is the future of social media! It’s better than Facebook and Twitter and CatPaint combined! It can haz cheezburger!

Or maybe not.

The past two weeks have painted an overly sanguine portrait of Google+’s new social service. Look through the recent list of Social Media Insider columns from Cathy Taylor and myself, and it reads like a stream of stories you’ll see friends sharing in Google+: a ton of stories about Google+ and a couple others about social media, though no cat pictures (sorry).

Google+ will hardly win over the masses overnight. The person who best anticipated the biggest threat to Google+ was none other than Julius Henry Marx, better known as Groucho. He wrote about sending a telegram to the Friar’s Club of Beverly Hills that read, “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” Woody Allen cited this in “Annie Hall” to explain his relationships with women, and it’s just as relevant to explain why early adopters can expect a tumultuous relationship with Google+.

Right now, Google+ is fun. Major tech stars are hanging out there. Some are even ditching their blogs and publishing exclusively on Google+, apparently to reach the 1% of Internet users who know what Google+ is. A few may think it’s prescient, but to me, it’s lunacy. Even if a billion people flock to Google+, you don’t ditch your own branded real estate to rent somewhere else — especially if the terms of the lease can change without notice. One minute, your rental has views of the ocean; the next minute, you’ve got a fratboy bar on one side, a mega-high-rise on the other blocking the view, a waterfront filling up with landfill, and a chain-smoking landlord telling you to pay him every time you want a visitor.

I keep going back to Groucho, though. Think about it from the casual user’s perspective. Today you get to rub elbows with Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gross and Sergey Brin, and of course the indefatigable Robert Scoble. When some Ford exec posts a hangout (aka video chat, for the non-Plussies among us), you can get in easily enough. People are so gaga over Google+ that when I went to get ice cream in Manhattan’s Chinatown over the weekend and ran into a friend from Microsoft, his first words to me were, “Thanks for the Google+ invite!”

Google+ is quickly getting too big for all of that. When Gmail launched, its invite-only phase lasted for more than a year, while weeks after Google+’s launch I can invite anyone I want. The initial enthusiasm of seeing Sergey Brin’s travel photos has turned into the frustration of having oversharers in the stream of updates. The rush of adding your friends gives way to figuring out how to avoid those acquaintances you don’t want stalking you on another network.

The people who love Google+ most are the people who act like publishers. Bill Gross, one of the most accomplished Internet pioneers of all time, was one so enamored with the comments on his Google+ posts that he announced the death of his blog. For me, I like being able to comment on luminaries’ posts, but I know most comments are already ignored now that the novelty is gone. Pretty soon, you’re just another name on the list, a trophy on the publisher’s mantle that barely anyone will see. Sure, Bill Gross could create a “Circle” (or “list”) of a dozen Internet luminaries and only address messages to them, but then hoi polloi will never get to take part. That’s precisely Google+’s challenge with emulating both Facebook and Twitter at once: it will always feel too big and too small.

What about video chat, though? Isn’t the “hangout” the best thing that Google has done maybe ever? The technology’s great, when it works, and it will get better. It may prove to be a threat to Skype, which is now part of Microsoft and a Facebook partner. It’s just as likely that people who use video chat through Google+ will want that feature and nothing else. As for the power users, you can have a focus group on Google+ with 10 people, or you can go on Ustream, broadcast to thousands (if not millions) of people at once, and have everyone take part via the comments and social network logins. There will only be so many occasions where you want to chat with 10 people (or even 20 if it scales further) but don’t want a public broadcast.

Following last week’s roundup of Google+ perspectives, I have two others to share with you. The first comes from an industry friend who sent me an email yesterday with the subject, “GOOGLE +++++ SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!” The body said, “What am I not getting? :)” Expect that to be a far more common sentiment as Google+ opens up to the masses.

Finally, let’s return to Groucho Marx, whose dying words were, “Die, my dear? Why that’s the last thing I’ll do!” We’re still talking about Groucho 121 years after his debut (His take: “I was born at a very early age”), so in many ways, he’s still with us. Google+ isn’t dead either, and dying’s the last thing it’ll do. Given how fast media consumption is changing, Google will be happy if we’re still talking about it a year after its launch. Using it’s another story, though.

When my company (Anthem) and I decided to start calling me their Digital Innovation Specialist, there was a lot of discussion about what that means. Innovation is a tricky word, because it simultaneously means a whole lot of different things and absolutely nothing, depending on your perspective. For me, it’s inextricably bound to creativity, but not necessarily in the making of stuff; more in the way we think about things that are and things that can/will be.

Today, I was impressed by fellow Brandeis graduate Ari Teman’s response below, in an interview with DesignBuzz.com back in 2007 (thanks to my wife for sending this to me). “Innovation is making people’s lives easier by thinking differently.” That’s pretty much what I try to do every day. Well done, sir.

4. What is innovation to you - design, technology or the creative processes itself?

Teman: Innovation is making people’s lives easier by thinking differently. I don’t think you can separate design from technology. Is great design the coolest abacus you can draw? No, I think it’s the latest computer nobody has even considered yet. Design is about advancing society. Throughout history people have thought they could make the world better just by making it prettier - that doesn’t work (and most of those people are considered dictators and war criminals now!). There’s a place for pretty things, but real beauty is one with function - and the creative process becomes obvious if the product is elegant.

It’s an interesting dilemma: to filter, or not to filter? I’ve been saying for years that you really have no choice; if you don’t filter, you’re guaranteed to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume and clutter of your social networks and the digital news cycle. However, Eli Pariser makes some extremely valid points in his fascinating interview about the risks of filtering everything: privacy implications, monotony, advertising implications. I suppose the key is to find a way to filter our filtering, allowing for the serendipitous discovery and identity-less (at least somewhat) browsing experience that allows us to truly discover again. It’s only going to get more complex as time goes on, so we all should be experimenting now.

Why a hyper-personalized Web is bad for you (Q&A) | Geek Gestalt - CNET News

We all like having things tailored to our specific needs and interests. But Eli Pariser thinks we should beware of the substantial risks inherent in the increasing personalization of the Internet.

Better known (so far) as the executive director of the progressive political action committee MoveOn.org, Eli Pariser is making noise these days as the author of “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You.” His new book, which was released yesterday, argues that the latest tools being implemented by the likes of Google and Facebook for making our Internet experiences as individual as possible are taking us down some very unsavory paths.

First, of course, Pariser explains the dynamic we all face online today: that no two people’s Web searches, even on the same topics, return the same results. That’s because search engines and other sites are basing what they send back on our previous searches, the sites we visit, ads we click on, preferences we indicate, and much more. Not to mention the fact that we are more and more shielded from viewpoints counter to our own.

But while the results are no doubt geared to what we’re most interested in, they come at a price—in terms of lost privacy, more ads, and even being followed by certain types of ads no matter where we go online.

Yesterday, Pariser sat down with CNET for a 45 Minutes on IM interview about his book and the problems that come with increasing personalization, and why people should care.