If you also do not twitter, you can see the image and read
some of the tweets on the Business Insider page about the stunt. Apparently,
when the supposedly “botched” advertising tweet launched, the sort of people
who both follow commercial bakeries/snack food producers and comment on their
advertising went berserk, sending thousands (or possibly millions) of derisive
tweets into cyberspace to mock the company for not knowing football from
baseball. The company responded with a second tweet, remarking on how excited
they were at the return of “Sportsball,” which rather settled the matter as far
as I was concerned: the term “Sportsball” is an Internet term which mocks
real-world sports and people who spend more time watching professional
athletics than running around in virtual communities online. I think we can
conclusively say that the company knew what it was doing; the more subtle issue
was whether or not this was a good idea…
It seems clear enough that Hostess is using this artificial “blunder”
to draw attention to itself – in this case, from thousands of twitter users and
anyone to whom they point out the original tweet. In a larger sense, though,
what they are doing is trying to get the audience to look at the cupcakes,
remember how good a Hostess cupcake tastes, and perhaps even associate the
company and the product with the start of spring, the start of baseball season,
or even with an amusing tweet, blunder or online event. Whether you remember
the specific tweet and the “TOUCHDOWN” caption or not, the company will be
closer to the front of your thoughts the next time you make a purchase decision
that involves snack foods – or, at least, that’s the idea…
The problem with advertising of this type is that nobody,
including the Industrial and Organizational psychologists who study it, knows
exactly how it works. Sometimes called the “Sleeper Effect,” the concept is
that some ideas grow in the amount of influence they have over someone’s
perceptions instead of fading away as they forget about the source material. In
this case, the idea would be that you remember Hostess snack cakes, and how
much you like to eat them, while forgetting about a possibly artificial mistake
they may have made on Twitter. When it works, it can have an impact all out of
proportion to the size, importance or cost of the media that produced it. Most
of the time, however, all you get are ads that offend people and don’t make any
sense, while fading off of the public consciousness and having no long-term
effect at all…
What makes this particular stunt so interesting is that it
didn’t cost Hostess anything to do it, which means that if it fails they can
always just try something else. Most ads of this type have involved more expensive
media, which entails the risk of not making back more sales differential than
you spent making the ad in the first place. But if everyone who makes or
markets consumer goods figures out that they can use this method to cut through
the clutter in current electronic media and get their ad into your mind despite
the interfering “noise,” then it seems likely that ads of this type will become
the norm, the world will fill up with new and more annoying “noise,” and
whoever is making these tweets will have to find some other approach and start
over…
No comments:
Post a Comment