The Sapient Nitro case study case study: promotional video fail

15 Nov

Okay so that title might be a little misleading and/or link-baity but I felt that I had to cover the quote, unquote: shitstorm: that just happened in the social media, while the aftermath continues to be felt by those that (and I do feel sorry for them) just got flamed to ridiculous levels for a tongue-in-cheek video.

 

(the video is small as I don’t think it will be around for long…)

I’m not going to do myself a dis-service and take on the behemoths of Econsultancy, The Wall and Shortlist, because they have covered this off perfectly and combined they add a perfect narrative to what happened over on our favourite social network:

 

What I will do is point out that an ‘Idea Engineer’ is actually a brain if you think about it.

 

 

It must truly suck to put that much effort into a concept, polish it up and expect the world to love it, only to have a parallel drawn between it and, for example, the PHD Worldwide ‘we are the future’ video (I’m still cringing at that), but I guess sometimes you just don’t see it coming. Sapient’s hyper-aggressive moderation of negative comments on their wall, followed by their subsequent removal of the post completely is a perfect example of how to lose in social media. For a creative agency that are supposed to be down with the social medias it’s quite shocking, but then again it’s not as bad as Nestle!

aaaaaaand I’m out.

 

**UPDATE**

 

On the back of fallen giants, others dance? – how about marketing for jobs at your company using the sapient traffic? cool idea or bad idea?

 

**UPDATE #2**

So Sapient have posted a response to the events of yesterday here:

The best bit? how about the “And feel free to comment at will. We’ll never delete them (that would be very very silly).“

Now am I the only one that thinks that this feels like they are learning social on the job? I don’t want to go on about it, but the deleting comments at a rate of knots yesterday is pretty bad, taking down the original post is worse, and then they go and say they won’t delete comments?

Of course they have been purposefully ambiguous as to where the comments need to be for them to be safe from deletion, that much is clear. It’s also not like they could have not commented on the events either, that had to happen, I just feel like they should have thought about things for a bit, seen the reaction they were getting and turned it into a funny rather than a social media worst practice case study for my and others to dig their teeth into.

very silly indeed.

 

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