I love Witchery. I love their clothes. I love their bags. I especially love their shoes.
But I don’t love their latest advertising campaign.
Last week, a young girl made headlines after posting a YouTube video about her quest to find a mystery man she met at a cafe who had left behind his jacket.
When the video was unmasked as an elaborate campaign by Witchery to spruik its new Menswear range, reaction from the public ranged from indignation to anger. Read all about it in this SMH report.
Viral campaigns such as these are not new in the UK or the States, where brands are resorting to more creative campaigns due to a fragmented media landscape and less people turning on their TVs. The Australian marketing industry is still finding its feet with the medium, leading to shaky first attempts like the Witchery video and Tourism Queensland’s “win a dream island job” campaign, which also turned sour after one of the applications turned out to be a fake.
To me, the problem is that marketers seem to have already broken the golden rule - never, ever lie to your public.
PS – the “marketing expert” quoted in the SMH article is my old editor. Neat, huh?
SO many companies lie to their public. Imagine how many companies there are out there which haven’t confessed to deceit. Their must be hundreds, possibly thousands.
That’s pretty bad – the last I read on it was them emphatically claiming it was not an advertising campaign
That’s witches for you. We gotta go all The Crucible on their butts.
It reminds me of a great quote by the comedian George Burns: “The key to acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made”