Ditch the bitch and other insults

Image from Marketing Week

Third party demarketing is when an outside body intervenes to ban a product or piece of marketing. Even if they are not successful, the surrounding publicity normally gives the brand a tremendous boost.  Which is what they were counting on.

One example of this strategy comes from George Shaw, the PR specialist responsible for the notorious 2001 'Ditch the Bitch' advertising campaign for London divorce lawyers Brookmans.  Shaw fell just short of admitting to deception: “Experience has taught us that the press are more likely to cover stories that have been leaked or they have unearthed for themselves” (Shaw 2013).  The client in this case was able to leverage a minute advertising budget into a campaign worth in excess of £1.5 million by carefully and covertly orchestrating viral marketing to give the impression to national media that the public was outraged by the slogans “Ditch the bitch” and “All men are bastards” (Clarke 2001).  

Shaw's strategy seemed to be to leak details of two otherwise obscure posters to moral guardians (women's groups) and regulators (the Advertising Standards Authority and the Law Society).  When the media storm had died down it became clear that far from being outraged, virtually nobody from the general public had complained (Dyer 2001), so there was no ban and no investigation. The Advertising Standards Authority received a single complaint: when this was rejected the campaign generated more headlines.

There was more good news for the creative team behind the low-budget campaign. It won the top award that year for ambient from the advertising trade journal Campaign.


References

Clarke, Anna (2001), “Legal firm attacked over 'ditch the bitch' ad campaign”, PR Week, 16 May

Dyer, Clare (2001), “Divorce lawyers' posters attacked”, The Guardian, 16 May
Shaw, George (2013), Brookmans Case Study, Avocado Media, London, via www.avocadomedia.co.uk/Pages/case.html  accessed February 2013