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

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