What links a monkey, suicide and a decent cuppa? Rachel Bristow, marketing communications and buying director at Unilever, speaking at Media 360, enlightened us on the connection.
When describing the media mix Unilever used when it resurrected the PG Tips monkey, Rachel spoke at length about the role of their online marketing activity, which included building a MySpace page for Mr Monkey, the stuffed character who has replaced the famous PG Tips chimps.
As she pointed out, when you put your brand out into the social space, there are times when people co-opt it for things that you’re not overly keen on. In this case, the monkey star appeared on www.monkeysuicide.com, a site which counts the numbers of ways a monkey can be ‘sacrificed’.
It’s actually a fun site, and not as bad as the name suggests, but it’s a good example of the online world taking a brand and mashing its message for its own amusement. In the end, Unilever decided not to take any action over the site and let it ride.
It was a good decision. The social media is not something that’s controllable, a point also made by Nigel Walley, managing director of Decipher, who earlier chaired the ‘New Technologies: New Challenges?’ panel. Nigel also opened an interesting debate over the word ‘digital’, more of that later.
