Autotweet attack: the campaign Coca-Cola launched at the Super Bowl was used to quote ‘Mein Kampf’.
To paraphrase Godwin’s law: If you tweet something widely enough, sooner or later it will be associated with Hitler or Nazis.
That’s the lesson Coca-Cola learned when it suspended its #MakeItHappy campaign after a prank used Coke’s autotweet function to quote lines from “Mein Kampf.”
#MakeItHappy, launched at the Super Bowl, featured a Twitter campaign that invited users to mark negative tweets with the hashtag #MakeItHappy. Coca-Cola automatically transformed the content of those marked tweets into friendly ASCII cartoons, such as a balloon dog.
The campaign took an unexpected turn when gossip site Gawker used the function to tweet the first four paragraphs of Hitler’s autobiography, using the handle @MeinCoke.
After Gawker’s prank gained Internet attention, Coca-Cola on Thursday suspended the campaign, stating to AdWeek: “The #MakeItHappy message is simple: The Internet is what we make it, and we hoped to inspire people to make it a more positive place. It’s unfortunate that Gawker is trying to turn this campaign into something that it isn’t. Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign.”
Coke told Business Insider its intention was always to end the campaign after Wednesday.
(Text: Matthew Rothenberg. This article first appeared on Campaign US.)
Coca-cola is a very popular brand. So, it is very clever of them to have a message clarifying what it was supposed to mean. This also makes coca cola more trustworthy. Many companies sometimes use twitter campaigns to advertise their product and when people actually buy it they don’t feel that satisfied as they felt when they first saw it on twitter. So, this shows that coke is using twitter to spread its product as far out as possible to customers solely ‘makeithappy’ and not to sell as much as possible. Also, i believe that no advertisement should be disrespectful towards any country, culture, religion, or group of people. This was very interesting to see how people react to different campaigns on social media especially when they are popular ones. Many companies should track and close down campaigns that are disrespectful or could hurt someone in one way or another