What is it about Torontonians that seem to be able to get the attention of the world? From Ogilvy Toronto doing Dove Evolution (in my view last year’s best campaign) to some Ryerson students and the recent “Bride Wigs Out” video on You Tube (below).

If you haven’t seen it, it is one of the first things I have seen that was more cringe-worthy than the British version of The Office. At the time I saw it, I wasn’t sure if it was real or not (turns out it isn’t) and I suspected as much at the time, but even considering the possibility of it being real made me feel very uncomfortable watching so much misery.

As it turns out it was staged by some actresses (here is Jodi’s MySpace page) and was staged on behalf of Unilever’s Sunsilk brand. Unilever’s succint press release stated:

TORONTO, Feb. 1 /CNW/ – The recent “Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out” video was an initiative from Sunsilk Haircare Brand in Canada.
The video was created to dramatize that “bad hair” is one of the challenges faced by young women, many of whom have experienced their own “wig-out” moments.
It was never Sunsilk Canada’s intent to portray anything other than a dramatization.

I have heard some hue and cry about deception and non-transparency, etc. but I say nonsense. There has to be room for storytelling and entertainment in new marketing, otherwise we are all in for a really boring ride. Two questions I would like to know:

1. What kind of heartless person seems to prefer that the tradgedies we see on YouTube are real? To me I felt relief upon finding out it was false.
2. And as a colleague of mine said this morning “Since when has YouTube become the champion of the documentary tradition?”

So while I will defend a brand’s right to entertain (even if not totally honest). I can’t defend this creative as a good marketing campaign, as we are once again witnessing “pull down your pants in public” forms of attention grabbing. Does this do anything for Sunsilk’s brand? It is some short-term notoriety yes, but there is no discernible pay off for the brand, no real follow up action that can be expected from the viewer and the message is muddy at best. This kind of knee-jerk viral campaign just doesn’t wash for me, they forgot to ask the most important question of all… If this goes viral, what happens next?

This entry was posted on February 2, 2007 at 11:19 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Advertising Opinion Public Relations Social Media Viral by dwalker 2 Comments