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June 27, 2006
Parkas in Hell
"Marketers must learn to let go of the control they think they have over
their brand. Once consumers have interacted with brands, they will
not go back to being shouted at by marketers."
"Consumers should be allowed to create their own commercials, and make comments on other brands [online], even if they are negative."
-- Mark Tutssel, worldwide chief creative officer at the Leo Burnett ad agency, speaking at the Cannes advertising festival.
Bravo.
Other blogs that reference Parkas in Hell:
Man, I am no longer sure about this. Mark Cuban, owner of the almost-champion Dallas Mavericks, has disabled comments on his blog because people apparently just hate him. And the video someone created and posted of a Comcast service technician sleeping while on a service call has been viewed over 400,000 times. Obviously, nobody can stop consumers from either despising Mark Cuban or putting videos online. But in both cases, brands have taken a serious beating, and the owner can exercise no control at all over it. From a purely business perspective, does this make sense? One lazy technician who accidentally starred in a really compelling video probably negated fifty million dollars of brand advertising for Comcast -- is this fair? Is this smart?
Peter,
I'm not sure I understand your question. Not fair?
What's not fair is that Comcast charges exorbitant prices and their service is terrible. I don't mean the poor tech who fell asleep, but the fact that their set-top boxes are buggy, cable service has lots of technical issues, and their call center folks are clueless. Now the customer has the ability to surface these issues in a way to draw attention to them and hold the company accountable.
For the record, Mark Cuban has not turned off comments for his blog. He turned them off for one post only.
