Skip to main content

Dr Pepper offers “two girls one cup” in automated status update campaign

The awkward similarity of SMRT’s Go Green campaign and that of Twitter’s “Fail Whale” has given rise to the conspiracy theory that the agency did that was preyng on SMRT’s lack of awareness of Twitter.

In the US, Coca Cola unwittingly approved an automated status that made reference to a classic, but tasteless, online porn site “two girls one cup”. The automated status campaign was part of the Dr Pepper’s fan page campaign to let Dr Pepper control the status updates of fans with humorous updates. Fan who signed up for the campaign stood a chance to win close to SGD2,500.

Unfortunately, the offensive status appeared on a 13-year-old profile who tried Googling for the movie.  Luckily, the installed child filter blocked the site and mother was alerted of the status update.

Coca Cola’s excuse was that they were unaware of the reference to “two girls one cup” when they approve the status.

Wrote http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/lean-mean-fighting-machine-under-threat-after-dr-pepper-porn-uproar/3015996.article

"The spokesperson continues: “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.”

Word of advice to Coca Cola, don’t ever throw “a lemon party” to promote a lemon flavoured drink.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Singapore radio personality in "hot soup" for reporting train delays based on Tweets?

Update - Hossan Leong has commented on this post to say " I'm not in trouble pls don't blow this out of proportion. Let it rest. It's getting silly. Thank you for your love and concern and I apologize for any misunderstanding." ~  Hossan Leong. Hossan Leong, a Singapore radio personality for The Gold Breakfast Show on Gold 90.5, was censured today for reporting on train delays on the Circle Line because he based the information on Tweets, rather than waiting for the official reports from the Circle Line operator, SMRT.  It is, however, unknown if the "warning" came from Mediacorp producers or SMRT. Tweeted Hossan Leong ,  OK...I reported it on air and now I'm getting into trouble for it?? The CC line is DOWN rite? I did nothing wrong rite? The SMRT Circle Line was reported to be down this morning during peak hours and started as early as 7am. However, local news only received official statement was received by the mainstream media at about 9...

DBS Bank – One Tweet too little too late.

(Updated post - DBS apologise with the 3Rs – Will social media bite? ) It was the bluest Monday for DBS/POS Bank in its entire banking history when more than 1000 of their ATM and online banking services were taken offline due to a software upgrade an outage (PR announced that it was down due to software upgrade, but the outsourcer, IBM, later claimed it was an outage). So on that Monday, DBS decided to sign up onto Twitter and post a 140 characters one-liner onto Twitter to post a one liner to inform the Twitterverse of the down time. Everybody knows that if you just create a new account on Twitter, you would start off with 0 friends. How would you be able to inform the Twitterverse if you start with 0 friends? DBS Bank did something smart to insert the #dbs and #posb and that probably drew some attention to this account. However, the effectiveness of the tweet was lacking as it drew only 28 retweets. As of this posting, DBS Bank attracted 274 followers. A letter to T...

New field in SocialPR: Social Media Crisis Communications

I have been busy with family for the Lunar New Year week but it seem the Singapore blog-o-sphere was active, and is still is, about recently formed Association of Bloggers (Singapore), ABS for short. To cut a long story short, the announcement of ABS via mainstream media didn’t go down well with Singapore bloggers and in the end resulted in some speculation to why ABS was set-up in the first place. A post by the ABS president defending herself against a harsh criticism from a blogger added to the bad start and created even more speculation that ABS was set-up with an ulterior motive. A week later, some founding members of the pro-team started posting up notice of resignation on their blogs and this just added fuel to fire. Again, a story of ABS appeared in mainstream media and this lead to even more disgruntled bloggers asking why the president isn’t responding via her blog or the association’s blog. I also responded to a post about the ABS incident. You can catch a summary of...