Notional Misconduct: Deep in the Matrix

A Toyota car ad

Making international headlines last week was “Woman Sues Toyota over terrifying Prank” :

In a lawsuit filed Sept. 28 in Los Angeles Superior Court, Amber Duick claims she had difficulty eating, sleeping and going to work during March and April of last year after she received e-mails for five days from a fictitious man called Sebastian Bowler, from England, who said he was on the run from the law, knew her and where she lived, and was coming to her home to hide from the police.

I wanted to know how a marketing campaign could have gone so wrong (or perhaps “so right”)? And although no one has ever become poor by underestimating the stupidity of people, I was curious how a marketing campaign could provoke such a reaction. From a country with a history of people suing advertisers (like this one where a man sued the makers of Bud Light for making ads involving tropical fantasies of beautiful women coming to life, because, and I'm dead serious here, he didn't have that experience when consuming Bud Light), I initially assumed that the woman suing Toyota was, how you say…a couple of beers short of a six-pack?

A Toyota car ad

But researching campaign, I noted that it was not just TV or Radio ads, but fake MySpace profiles, print ads,personalized email spam, text messages, phone calls....

I'll let the Art Director responsible for the campaign describe it to you (short flash video). It's worth checking it out as it is a very involved campaign.

In brief: How it works is that someone would sign up one of their friends selecting one of the 5 "maniacs", and then that friend would be spammed with a variety of personalized communications by said maniac, and in the case above, threaten to come and live at their house and get them to help pay for hotel damage bills.

The campaign was targeting the 35 year old males demographic, with no life commitments and are "sick of advertising". Keeping this in mind, it's no wonder that a clever campaign like this managed to avoid looking like advertising, thereby "terrorizing" unwitting participants, however I'm not quite sure Saatchi & Saatchi are culpable, and I'm not sure it's fair to accuse the women of stupidity. The campaign was designed to be a disturbing prank, and it succeeded. Blending the power of Web 2.0 technologies and slick personalized advertising messages, it blurred the distinction we consumers have come to understand between advertising and 'real-life'. Despite the lawsuit (in fact I would argue because of the lawsuit) expect more clever campaigns like this in the future.