In writing about how lame he thinks the Captain Morgan’s Rum fake blog is, Joël Céré says:
I think it is less bad than the Mazda experiment as at least it allows for comments, and there are regular postings. Although there are some speculations on how such new blog got so many comments so quickly. Gus thinks that Captain Morgan should thank the agency’s “assistants, interns, secretaries, college students, elance or maybe just one guy/gal with a strong pot of coffee and a really wild imagination.” I would agree with that.
Joël points to a string of conversations (from BlogPulse’s new conversation tracker) talking about how poor this effort is, adding:
[…] So should Captain Morgan walk the plank? If you take it as a commercial blog and therefore have very low expectations, it is not too bad in its category. But ultimately time will decide. When the ad agency’s interns will cease to be incentivised to keep it alive, it will be up to the good decent Internet people to judge. The ones who don’t bother giving up their home address so they can have a discussion with a bottle of rum.
It’s a very slick site indeed, apparently put together by the brand’s ad agency (the brand owner is Diageo). So this brings to my mind a pithy and succint commentary by Hugh McLeod on the perils of allowing your advertising agency to get involved with your blog:
[…] The fact is, ad agencies hate blogs. They utterly despise them, even if they tell you otherwise. They hate them because if done well, they’re cheap and they’re easy. Frankly, they’re in the business of selling you stuff that is neither.
They also hate blogs because blogging rewards authenticity and punishes insincerity, whereas the ad agency business model does EXACTLY the opposite. Blogs have a fundamental conflict of interest with the economics and ethics of running a traditional ad agency, and no slick, Cluetrain-savvy agency pitch is going to change that.
My summary: ad agency + fake blog > critical blog posts > negative opinion = cheapens brand.
Surely the thing to do is hire an ad agency where they have agency blogs. I can’t think of any, but I know there are some.
Absolutely, Alice. If I were an ad agency client, I’d seriously question the agency’s credibility if they proposed blogs as part of my ad planning when they don’t have one themselves or don’t illustrate any depth knowledge about them from the communication point of view. Same for PR agencies, for that matter.
The issue about fake blogs really is about the ‘voice authenticity’ of the blog, its writer(s) and the commenters. I think a fake blog can be part of a communication programme as long as it’s not deceptive (meaning you know it’s not for real). What then helps make it a success will be its authenticity, all other things being equal.
Personally, I have been the victim of quite a few of Capt. Morgan’s horroriffic ad campaigns on the NYC Subway. It’s like they strive to do the most inauthentic, laughably off-mark marketing campaigns. I think the good captain’s rep is far beyond sullied at this point.
I think Hugh McLeod is right on target. I can think of few things less authentic than big time advertising agencies and the garbage they produce. I predict they will be among the last to geniunely adopt blogging as a part of their world, though they will no doubt work hard to convince us otherwise.