The Month in Media: May

McDonald’s Controversy

Following the backlash Pepsi faced with their ill-timed protest inspired advert you’d think companies would be triple checking whether an ad they were producing was going to cause controversy. The latest McDonald’s ad tapped into childhood grievance as a young lad searched for familiarities with his deceased dad, luckily he found that in the form of a Fillet -o- Fish, which was also his father’s favourite.

Like the Pepsi ad, this was pulled quickly following the understandable backlash. However, the day after the ad airing, it was one of the most talked about things on social media, a coincidence? Maybe so, but it still definitely did a job. 

Snap glasses

Snapchat have probably endured the toughest first quarter of any social platform, completely missing their estimates by nearly $10m, a reported net loss of $2.2b and user numbers dropping off too.

Facebook are largely the cause of this, implementing a range of new features on their own Snap rival in Instagram and their efforts in bullying Snapchat into irrelevance seem to be working.

In an attempt to hang on to relevancy they’ve released their alternative to Google Glass in the form of ‘Spectacles’. With the tagline of “make memories from your perspective” they’ll be hoping their quirky marketing campaign means this launch goes a whole lot better than that of Google Glass.

Facebook exploitation

Whilst Snapchat were having their troubles, Facebook weren’t without their own. Coming under fire after leaked documents found that the platform had told advertisers they could identify and target teens that were feeling ‘insecure’ ‘worthless’ and ‘In need of a confidence boost’.

Coming after Facebook’s integrity already being called into question regarding the spreading of ‘fake news’ not too long ago, this was the last thing they needed being leaked to the public.

Small businesses not utilising social

Manta surveyed 4,500 small business owners and found that 51% of them were not using social media as a form of marketing their brand. Though half of them did admit that they thought it was a useful platform for growing their business.

The stats are thought to be down to SMB’s not having the time to run a social page due to limited staffing etc.

However, in a time when consumers are so social media savvy, to not be utilising such a cost effective form of advertising really is setting yourself up for an early fall. Social pages for any size business owner act as an online shopfront, a first point of contact for someone searching for your services and if it isn’t up to scratch, they will go elsewhere.

Walkers blunder
Surely brands by now have learned that they can’t trust the internet to self-regulate their input to online campaigns. Walkers however clearly missed that memo.

Their Champions League campaign saw Gary Linekar holding up a card in front of his face, asking the public to submit their selfies via Twitter that would then appear on the card. All well and good, if the selfies are being monitored…

Obviously, that wasn’t the case, as the result was Gary holding up the likes of Rolf Harris, Harold Shipman and Jimmy Saville for the whole of the social media world to see.

Google fight to restore confidence

The cracks are still refusing to be covered for Google following the findings that they were pushing company ads alongside extremist material online.

After a string of household names boycotted their services for advertising, the panic has clearly and rightfully set in as they continue to face an uphill struggle to convince advertisers that the problem is solved.

Last month saw them promise their ad platform AdSense would begin removing ads on a page by page basis, as opposed to the previous method of targeting whole websites that were allowing offensive material to slip through.

May at MAG

We’ve started our highly anticipated work with nutrition giants Herbalife in the form of a huge social campaign combined with OOH to promote their ‘ideal breakfast’.

World Milk Day fell on the 1st June, so we launched a massive video campaign across Facebook and Twitter designed to educate audiences on the issues with the dairy industry. The campaign reached well over one million people and a ‘Thunderclap’ that was set up meant thousands on Twitter also relayed the message on their own feed.

Our striking campaign with Today Tix brightened up the London Underground whilst our OOH campaign with China Southern popped up on the building of one of their direct competitors!