Paddy Power: going the extra mile to provoke

Image from Paddy Power blog on Wordpress

A recent example of a brand courting controversy is Paddy Power.  Theirs seems to be a classic case of third party demarketing - designed to be provocative in order to get banned.

Like the early easyJet study, Paddy Power campaigns picked strategically placed billboards on which to make provocative gestures (mocking Fernando Torres, for example).  Provocation seemed to define the Paddy Power brand, although one would be hard pressed to find the company admitting to deliberately deceiving the public and media.  Brown had earlier (2001) described how the fruit juice brand Tango had been censured in 1994 for duping an estimated 30,000 people into calling a bogus customer help line. Paddy Power, though, seemed to adopt the approach advocated by George Shaw of Avocado Media, leaking the story and allowing the press to find it for themselves.  In 2012 the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled on 7 formal complaints about Paddy Power, upholding 6 and rejecting one.  It also informally resolved 5 cases figuring Paddy Power marketing, including sales promotions, web pages and emails.  Dutifully, Britain's national and trade press reported the complaints and judgments: obligingly Paddy Power made the banned material available to the public via social media and the worldwide web.  

The company's own YouTube pages included the boast “Paddy Power Blind Football - Most complained advert in 2010" – although ironically this was the sole complaint which the ASA rejected from that year.  Paddy Power's YouTube presence includes 90 videos, which at the time of writing had been viewed nearly 14 million times.  These were fed by 125,000 followers on Twitter and 730,000 fans on Facebook.


References
Brown, Stephen (2001), “Torment your customers (they'll love it)”, Harvard Business Review, October

Shaw, George (2013), Brookmans Case Study, Avocado Media, London, via www.avocadomedia.co.uk/Pages/case.html  accessed February 2013