Need help with a very sensitive complaint against a massive multinational!

[MrsRickman]

Ok, here goes.
Coca Cola are running a promo via their Dr Pepper brand just now on facebook. It is called 'status takeover' and involves the application putting an embarrassing or funny status on your FB page.
My 14 yo dd participated and I was HORRIFIED to log into FB and see that her status read - 'I watched 2 girls one cup and felt hungry afterwards'. For anyone who doesn't know what this means, please stay ignorant, for those who do, you can imagine how I felt. This was compounded later on when a quick search through dds internet history revealed she had tried to find out what it was for herself. Thankfully, our ISP has a wonderful child filter!!
So, after various emails and phonecalls to CocaCola marketing I have been offered (quite offensively) as way of compensation, a night in a hotel and theatre tickets for the West End. Fat lot of use to me, we live in Glasgow.
So, how do I proceed? ASA? I am absolutely fizzing with rage and disgust, and want a full apology and explanation. CocaCola are saying they use outside marketing teams for different brands and it's outside their jurisdiction. Help!?

"Guardian, but as they are very anti-censorship "

Hardly. See recently, for example, Julie Bindel's column on pornography. Bindel's pretty much a fixture over on Comment Is Free, and the general censorship of pornography is justified to protect women from abuse' position is hardly contentious. Censorship is not an unalloyed wrong, and there are cases where it's the lesser of two evils. In the case of exploitative pornography in which there's a strong chance the models' have been co-erced, even Guardianistas would agree.

www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/02/gail-dines-pornography

MrsRickman

There is a piece in today's The Sun and we would be happy to run a better piece with your side of the story. Give us a call on 0141 420 5208, or the email address you contacted us on yesterday, if that was indeed yourself.

Regards

It's reported in Campaign (the ad industry's trade magazine) that Lean Mean Fighting Machine, the agency who came up with the campaign are likely to lose the Coke account.

Apols if this has already been posted, not had time to read the entire epic thread.

Article in full:
'Coca-Cola, owner of the Dr Pepper brand, launched the May promotion which resulted in a 14-year-old girl's status update being hi-jacked and a reference to a pornographic movie appearing on her page.

The offending status update pretended the 14-year-old had watched a movie on YouTube called '2 Girls 1 Cup'. The message stated: "I watched 2 girls one cup and felt hungry afterwards".

The girl's mother said her daughter searched for the movie after reading the update, but was blocked by the child filter.

Lean Mean Fighting Machine was awarded the account in April but a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola said an investigation had been launched and the soft drinks giant would be reviewing its relationship with the agency.

As revealed today (20 July), Lean Mean Fighting Machine has picked up the digital ad account for Coca-Cola's Coke Zero brand. Coca-Cola confirmed that the investigation could also affect this appointment as the relationship was being reviewed in its entirety.

The spokeswoman said: "It has been brought to our attention that the Dr Pepper promotion on Facebook posted an offensive status update.

"We apologise for any offence caused. As soon as we became aware of this we took immediate action and removed the status update from the application.

"We have also taken the decision to end the promotion. We were unaware of the meaning of this line when the promotion was approved and have launched an investigation into why it was included.

"We take full responsibility and will be reviewing our promotional procedures. We will take all steps necessary to ensure this does not happen again."

The Facebook app gave consumers the chance to win £1,000 if they allowed Dr Pepper to take control of their status updates.

The updates were chosen at random from a bank of options including "Lost my special blankie. How will I go sleepies?" and "what's wrong with peeing in the shower?" to "never heard of it described as 'cute' before".

The activity formed part of a continuation of the 'What's the Worst that Could Happen?' creative.

Dr Pepper is no stranger to flirting with controversy. For April Fool's Day the brand launched activity on Chatroulette, playing with the idea that male teens use the site to flirt with girls.

It showed an American-styled cheerleader dancing for the viewer. As the dance developed she encouraged the viewer to interact and perform embarrassing tasks before an elderly man dressed as a cheerleader appeared'

coraltoes Im not being rude about all students but this line came across to me as an ugly piece of teenage/student male humour, likely to emerge from this age group rather than an older one.

The person who came up with the line has to take responsibility for their own puerile sense of humour and lack of judgement, and the consequences for their future career.

However of course the management at the agency and Coca-cola's own team are responsible for allowing it to reach the public eye. Other clients of this agency will be questioning whether their brand reputation is safe in their hands.

MrsRickman, even if it is a bit late, I wanted to agree with all those others that you have done the right thing. Congratulations! As one poster said: I want to be you when I grow up.

There is a whole new aspect of worry in which world my little girl is going to grow up.
Bad enough that Coca Cola let this happen but I can not believe that there are actually people defending it and finding it normal or even important that a teenage girl should get in contact with scat porn, something I hadn't known until reading this thread.

I am also, for once, irritated that there is not more coverage in the press. But, just for an update, I found it on several German and Austrian news homepages. They avoid saying what kind of porn it was but are more accurate about MrsRickmans reaction towards the theater tickets.

Not sure if other brands would allow anything 'edgy' and an airline like Emirates isn't likely to use quite such a method.

However, I think it will damage the agency and being listed as a client might be sufficient embarrassment (!) for firms not to want to have their brand tarnished by association, even if the methods used to promote them in the past were safe.

Naturopath What was the pornographic status put on the 13-yr-old's Facebook page?

I think one of the reasons it has been ignored is everyone thinks the status was a one-off, which I think is rather unlikely. So the more people say they saw one the better.

Plus sites are just regurgitating the Guardian's weak story with the other harmless statuses so the upshot is 'oh well MrsRickman's dd didn't see anything so that's ok and look at all the others they are fine'.

What about the other kids with less astute parents who have. They aren't going to tell their parents are they so how does anyone know how many kids had this on their Facebook?

Coke must have kept track for the purposes of giving out the prize. Perhaps they could check the age of everyone who had the setting to most embarrassing and then there would be a more accurate idea of the actual harm.

Still astounded the agency getting the boot is a bigger story than the actual story.

Still no sign of a hefty donation to internet safety and a 'please close your profiles, kids' from Coke?

eating excrements is not really pornography, it is just insane, but no child nor adult is seriously marred by watching it. it is just disgusting. and it is not illegal to write the name of such a movie on any website you want, even if the kid is 2 years old. and it will never be illegal. so what do you want? i find it an excellent campaign. Very funny! completely unoffending and - thanks to you - extremely efficient. Thank you very much!

If you want an insight into the characters at LMFM see this video from about 1m 15s as you'll see the Boss and some of the staff, somewhere near King's Cross...

Hang on Dittany - the mention of an agency is quite reasonable and to me doesn't look "stupid" but sharing the blame (rightly so).

Coca-Cola may come across as stupid for not recognising the line - plenty of possible reasons for not knowing that this was a vile video, one of them being previously unexposed to even the name!

If someone wrote a line about calling a friend "a daft melonfarmer" would you immediately know that 'melon farmer' had been used to dub out 'motherf...er' years ago ?

I don't advocate swearing, and generally manage to avoid it, but seeing what other people say (on TV) and write (on the web), one could become desensitised somewhere down the line. I came across the melonfarmer aspect when looking at film reviews where the 'Mary Whitehouse' effect has slowly been dropped - still plenty of restrictions, I assume, but while there are boundaries, it almost encourages some to try to overstep them.

Thanks for link to the Sun - I assume the text was prepared on Monday (given the competition was closed on Sunday) but given the limited coverage in other papers, I'll let them off that minor discrepancy, and for the 'exclusive' banner!

Not sure, dittany, if the MN entry mangled your link to the Scottish Sun but was gratified to see they included a graphic from the web, so it shows how a few sample messages are quite tame, without any participant knowing what the rest might be like.

As for you, nastygrandpa, given this is your first post, it's clear you aren't a regular, and I don't plan to 'debate' anything with you, given your peculiar views. Writing 'extremely efficient' makes it sound like you were part of the team working on this, though I shouldn't credit you with having that ability.

I take it you will accept that if 50% of households which have bought Dr Pepper in the past decide to ban it, Coca-Cola will be unhappy. If 50% of households decide to ban any Coca-Cola product, GB executives of the company will be considering their options (for future employment).

Pretty decent coverage by The Sun I would say. At least they called it for the 'sick', 'vile' promotion that it was.

I suspect that Coca-Cola head office are very, very pissed off by this.

At one point in a past job, DH had dealings with Coca-Cola head office, and in particular with some of the people responsible for brand image there. He described them as 'women you would not want to mess with' - two very impressive, competent women from American South, of an age to have teenage daughers themselves. Judging by his experiences with them, they would not take their company being linked with porn lightly, and they would well and truly kick ass with the people concerned when it happened. The Coca-Cola lawyers fight fierce, and are quite happy to break existing contracts should they feel it's in the company's interests. I wouldn't be suprised if an order comes in from head office for Lean Mean Fighting Machine (the media company in question) to be let go.

p.s. WeeHector - my first guess from working in IT was that one guy thought it would be funny to sneak something inappropriate into the list of status updates, but if you see the rest of the status updates you'll see there are also several very clear references to masturbation, so that seems less likely.

And what idiot of a project manager lets their promotion go out without TRIPLE checking that their programmers have not put 'funny' things in the code.

If she'd won the £1000 she wouldn't be complaining.

Don't blame the agency. The client signed off the idea. They knew the risks. They have to take joint responsibility. The strategy would lead to disasters like this. Anyway, you got loads of publicity out of it so it's worked, whereas I can't see the Facebook idea really selling Dr Pepper, another digital social network gimmick. Disgusting tasting stuff.

Both from Brand Republic discussion area. Quite a mix of views, including some concerned for the industry, given this "PR disaster", and another said "Too eager - too high risk"

"but if you see the rest of the status updates"

Have you found a list, GM, please ?

Oh wow, I've got to the end!

I'd just like to say, I'm not that much older than our pet troll, have a child in secondary school and I don't think this is acceptable nor would I want my child looking at it. I'm not, by any stretch, a prude but I wouldn't expose my children to stuff like that, even milder porn even if it wasn't classed as sexual abuse under UK law! I'd rather not go into my sexual preferences here, I am pretty open to things (I could easily scare any of the pets if I had 5 minutes with them, they're all Internet talk and no trousers - that's "pants" to you) but I don't even want to look at that video. I have to not allow the words to get into my head too much when I read it because I have a pretty good (slightly over active) imagination and don't want to fill in the gaps for myself!

As a Doula I understand that what one person finds traumatic another person might brush off as funny. That is as equally true in what a teenager watches as it is in birth.

I'm still laughing at the UK being called puritanical! I thought that's why a little group of people left the UK for America!

Hmmm, wonder if xeroxeroxero in the Twitter box is really Jimbo - xeroxeroxero complaining about bullying MNetters and being libelled.

Not sure, but Jimbo seemed a bit miffed at times!

Wiki has an explanation of 2girls1_cup so without seeing it you can learn how vile it is just from the description. I'm fairly broadbminded but would not bother to seek it out after the description on Wiki. Not sure what you mean by "pets" but perhaps best left unanswered!

Another thing, about there being other things in the world to worry about, worrying about one thing doesn't stop you worrying about another.

I do things like Nestle boycott, I am a lactivist, I volunteer for my HA, for the local children's team, for Sure Start, for St John, I donate to charities, I don't drive...

I can't change the world but I can do my bit where I can.

Network Guy "the company has been the subject of much worse accusations"

Sorry, but what is 'worse' - can you give any links to stories ?

I suppose it depends of your definition of worse - while I applaud what MrsR has done in standing up for her daughter and getting the campaign pulled, and I think that what was posted on the status was wrong on several levels, in reality, what we are talking about is a marketing cock up - a fairly major one, but a cock up none the less.

Much worse is stealing water and releasing toxic chemicals into the ground to poison the remaining water, or selling toxic waste to farmers as 'fertilizer' www.indiaresource.org/campaigns/coke/

Or what about hiring militia to kidnap, torture and murder people for daring to organise workers unions? www.naturalnews.com/028844_Coca-Cola_Colombia.html and asianfoodworker.net/?p=1112

As abhorrent as that facebook status was, it really isn't anywhere near the worst thing Coke has ever done or is capable of doing.

Understood williwk - and I think some of what you refer to was in the Channel 4 'Dispatches' show around 18-24 months ago.