Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Blunder or Not?

Personally, I’ve never really seen the appeal of Twitter; I have enough trouble getting my thoughts down in 600+ word blog posts; there’s no way I’d be able to get anything I’d want to say into a single tweet. Consequently, I did not see the tweet issued by the Hostess company (presumably the new owners of Hostess) yesterday in honor of Opening Day for Major League Baseball. It’s a picture of a Hostess cupcake – a yellow cake with vanilla frosting version, instead of the better-known chocolate cake product, with red icing in curlicues on top – with the caption “TOUCHDOWN.” Seen from the top down, the red-on-white cupcake really does look remarkably like a baseball, or at least a cake made to look like a baseball. The problem, if problem it was, is that the term “touchdown” applies to a scoring play in American-Rules football, not baseball…

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…

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