In mid-October, the Spokesmonster made his debut on the projection screen in the MyFrontSteps blounge (that’s the boardroom/lounge, where we hold meetings, drink beer, and play video games). The monster ate a squirrel, the audience chuckled, applause was dutifully bestowed, and everyone shuffled back to work.
A couple days later, the cartoon was uploaded to YouTube, and someone posted a link on the StepRep blog.
A couple more days passed, and then we got word that Benn at the Agent Genius blog had posted an article about MyFrontSteps and StepRep. At the end of his post he linked to the Spokesmonster cartoon and asked his readers, “What do you think?”
Well, they didn’t like it. They did not like it at all. (Scroll down to the comments section.)
Some sample comments:
“I think it’s insane – what were they thinking?”
“Aside from trying to insult as many people as possible with the video, what exactly is the point here?”
“Not funny, not cute, not quirky, not effective at all. By the way, this 100% hillbilly found it a poor attempt to engage, insulting, and quite boring.”
“hi guys. this is really really bad. really bad. nothing good about it at all so nothing salvagable. scrap scrap scrap.”
“It is another case of someone putting up a video that is a result of a brainstorming gone too far.”
“Wow. Way to insult the user! Marketing, basic professionalism EPIC FAIL!”
This was pretty perplexing to us here at MyFrontSteps. It certainly hadn’t been our intention to insult anybody. We thought the cartoon was goofy and harmless.
Obviously, what we find funny in the blounge is not the same thing they find funny in the comments section at Agent Genius.
But you can’t make an ad that everyone hates and then defend yourself by saying, “They just don’t get it.” Marketing is about appealing to your consumer. If the consumer hates your ad, whether he “gets it” or not is beside the point. The ad has failed.
But here’s the funny part. StepRep is a product to help people monitor, manage, and build their online reputation. And now it was our Spokesmonster who required reputation management!
It seemed that this was a perfect opportunity to put our reputation management software into service. So we rushed a sequel into production…
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