As you may or may not have heard, over the last several days there’s been lots of discussion around a controversial TV ad/video that Johnson & Johnson’s Motrin launched on its website last Friday. You can easily find it with a few quick searches.

The ad/video was meant to play on the fact that “baby wearing moms” are just doing so to be trendy. Well, there was quite a backlash and, as a result, the Motrin.com website was down for several hours and when it came back was sans video plus an apology from the vice president of marketing.

The overall impact to Motrin’s brand over the long term will likely not be that significant, but Mortin’s experience holds an important lesson for all marketers.

For starters, let’s breakdown the timeline and go through some of the do’s and dont’s of what happened.

Friday, November 14—Motrin launches a new ad campaign on Motrin.com with a video featuring “baby wearing moms.” This video does not have any embed code, so no one can take the video elsewhere unless they are really motivated. I’m assuming Motrin did some market testing to see how the messaging would play out, but it appears that the group tested was not entirely representative.
Problem #1: First, launching a campaign on a Friday is a risky endeavor. You don’t get immediate feedback and if you do, the people who can react are most likely off for the weekend. In probably 98% of cases, launching a campaign on a Friday is a safe bet. In the 2% case, your team needs to be ready to react to the situation at hand. There are a number of ways to stay on top of what’s happening across the web including the social web (Tweetbeep, Twitscoop, Google Alerts, Google Trends, Addict-o-Matic, Trackur, etc.) Any of these would have given Motrin an idea of what was happening over the weekend.

Problem #2: It’s been shown before that moms are a powerful online demographic and that marketers need to be aware of this fact. Message testing with representative audiences hopefully would have given Motrin an early warning.

Saturday and Sunday—The firestorm was brewing on Saturday and Sunday as numerous blogs and the Twitter community started to pick up on the ad, with no response from Motrin. The image below shows mentions of “Motrin” on Twitter over Saturday and Sunday. Notice the lack of traffic prior to Saturday.

Image courtesy of Jeremiah Owyang

Problem #3: It appears that, at this point, no one was monitoring what was occurring until late Saturday or early Sunday morning. It was also at this point that users had captured the video from Motrin.com and posted it to YouTube, where it has been viewed 70,000 times as of this posting. Visitors to Motrin.com could view the video until around 5 pm on Sunday, which only exacerbated the problem.

Monday, November 17th—Twitter, blogs and much of the social media universe was ablaze with conversation around Motrin and the ad (and not in a good way). Motrin.com went down some time late Sunday or early Monday and stayed down for several hours until the vice president of marketing posted an apology, which you can find here.

Here are five things we can take away from the Motrin’s faux pas:

1. Message testing is key. Marketing 101 tells us that messaging is one of the keys to a successful campaign. And when you are going out on a limb with any messaging strategy that hasn’t been used before, this is especially the case.

2. The power of the echo chamber. If this example shows us anything, it’s that once an opinion is introduced into the social web, it can take on a life all its own.

3. If it’s on the web, it’s social.Even if you don’t necessarily provide the tools to share your content with others, if it’s posted to the web, it becomes social media.

4. Influencers are the linchpin. As AdAge points out, it wasn’t necessarily that so many were outraged as to who was outraged. A few influential bloggers and members of the Twitter community were upset by the ads which led others to follow suit.

5. And finally, be prepared. When a new campaign launches, it’s imperative to have both “worst case” and “best case” response scenarios in place.