Bacardi Fails With Get Ugly Girlfriend Campaign

Matthijs Roumen @ viralblog

Bacardi launched a website in order to promote their beverage, the Bacardi Breezer. While creative directors of the Israeli agency McCann Digital thought this approach would be fun for their target audience, most likely to be influentials in female peer groups, they totally missed the point and failed deeply with their campaign “Get An Ugly Girlfriend!”.

What happened? And why did this campaign ended up like something familiar that happened to Motrin (see the article: The Motrin Case: The Voice Of The Crowd, right here on ViralBlog). Lets have a closer look at the campaign.

To start of with a hard statement: creativity isn’t what is used to be. Instead of targeting it on an individual, your campaign is being judged by a tribe of peers, who look critically as a mass to the message you try to bring to them.

Your message has to land clearly. Perhaps, this ad could have been a hit 10 years ago. If Bacardi launched it back then, the message could have come clean to a small group ofcrowd leaders. The ones who lead offline groups and are being respected by the rest of the group. Less communication in between the members and a big believe in the group leader; the one who pushes the message down the pyramid. If this leader loves the message, it’ll spread.

But now there is no more pyramid. It’s a sphere of peers, communicating as a tribe. No leadership, so every individuals opinion counts just as heavy. There is mutual respect for opinions from peers in any social sphere. If a message like this is disliked by a few of these individuals, the rest of the group reviews it once more.

So make sure you’ll let your creative message being tested by a tribe, not by a crowd. Aim for individual opinions in a tribe, not individual opinions in a crowd.

The campaign also caught a lot of traction on Search, Twitter and blogs.

Of course the buzz on Twitter and blogs caught the attention of Bacardi, who came with the following statement;

“Thank you for taking the time to post your story on Bacardi Breezer.

The campaign you are referring to ran in 2008 for two months in Israel. Even though Bacardi Breezer is not sold or distributed in the United States, we immediately notified the appropriate Bacardi affiliate and had this website shut down.

Bacardi proudly celebrates diversity and we do not endorse the views of this site. We sincerely apologize to anyone who was offended by this site and thank you for bringing it to our attention.