Bruce Stewart of O’Reilly posted an IM interview last night with fictional blogger Dr. Myra, a creation of the Durham, N.C. ad firm McKinney. McKinney has created a fake Wikipedia entry, among other tactics, as part of its current stealth “Pherotones” campaign.
Said Bruce:
I definitely agree with most critics that [McKinney] went too far when they tried to pollute the Wikipedia with a bogus pherotone entry. C’mon guys, the Wikipedia is having enough trouble with mainstream public perception lately, it really doesn’t need ad folks trying to manipulate entries too.
So Bruce asked Dr. Myra about it. The exchange:
DrPherotone: Hi. How are you today?
bruceETel: doing well, thanks! What’s going on with the wikipedia entry for pherotones, do you know? did you write that entry?
DrPherotone: Well, when you consider the groupthink that rules
mainstream “acceptable” science, it’s surprising they let it stay up for even one minute.
DrPherotone: No, but it is based on a lot of my work.
bruceETel: Are you going to try and fight to keep it up?
DrPherotone: You can’t fight city hall. The only way to keep it up there is to prove once and for all the existence and potency of Pherotones. That’s the only fight I am interested in.
bruceETel: Are you working for McKinney Silver?
DrPherotone: No, they work for me.
Anyone who reads Media Orchard knows we have a sense of humor. So please indulge us for a moment as we go back into “curmudgeon” mode.
Look, McKinney’s campaign has worked — no question. It’s achieved a good measure of blog buzz, and, negative or positive, McKinney clearly could care less. It’s a win for them.
So, we now must ask this:
Are we prepared for the day when hundreds of other advertising firms — large and small, hip and not hip, ones who “get it” and ones who don’t — are making up “facts” and posting it on Wikipedia, and making the whole bloggy world like a chat room where a 14-year-old girl always has to wonder if she’s chatting with a 50-year-old man who’s just pretending to be a 14-year-old boy?
We know: very curmudgeonly of us.
But we do wonder.
Update: Looks like McKinney has toned down the Wikipedia entry, although the firm is still not coming clean. Half-measures don’t cut it, gang; just pull it, apologize and move on.
Technorati tags: Pherotones, Advertising, Public Relations, Marketing
Thanks for the link Scott. But I’m not sure that it’s true that this has been all that successful or that “McKinney clearly could care less”. Most of the blogosphere buzz is about whether they should be doing campaigns like this at all, not about the mysterious campaign itself. The rapid outing of McK as the creator of the site and the bogus wikipedia entry forced them to admit that it was a marketing campaign probably far sooner than they would have liked to, and I have a hunch that some of the people involved may be feeling like the whole thing wasn’t such a great idea now. We still don’t know who it was intended to promote (and maybe now we never will). This isn’t looking like a terribly successful marketing campaign to me.
I hope you’re right, Bruce. I just feel like most of the feedback to this point has been, “What’s the big deal?” and even Steve at Adrants has backed down a bit and accepted the Dr. Myra blogads.
I’m usually the person who SAYS “what’s the big deal” about blog “ethics” and such issues. But in this case, there appears to me to be a remarkable lack of concern over what McKinney has done.
My advice to McKinney is to pull the Wikipedia entry, issue a brief apology, and be done with this. Live and learn, guys.
The sad thing is, this could have been a funny and successful character blog – sex sells after all! But two serious mis-steps in my opinion:
- Stealth. I think you have to be upfront about who is sponsoring a blog, whether it is a joke, or a character blog, or just a plain old regular blog. You also have to be upfront that it is a character.
Some may disagree with me on this, citing stealth ad campaigns and the like which have been very successful. IMO there are vastly different expectations for blogging. You know, honesty, transparency….
- The wikipedia manipulation. just silly. Post all the made up joke stuff on your own site — we’ll all laugh — but it is unethical to mess around with shared resources like wikipedia.
And if you don’t care about ethics, remember you can’t do it without getting caught. Whether its a fake entry or just a manipulation of a real one.
The Wikipedia page is gone now.
Scott – Stealth may work short term, but long term it won’t benefit the agency or the client.
What should PR folks do? Keep doing our best work. Any agency trying to cash in quickly on a hot new technology without understanding it will eventually stumble.