Well, thanks Super Bowl. Because of you—and more specifically, the advertisements and musical performances surrounding the actual sports part of things—the Internet was filled to the brim with stuff to get upset about and have opinions on this week. Though we’d be remiss if we didn’t also point out you should be paying attention to Twitter’s CEO admitting the company “suck[s] at dealing with abuse” and whatever fallout comes from that, and reading Lindy West’s amazing piece about confronting a vocal troll. Really, those both might give you some hope for the future of humanity when it comes to the Internet … just in time for the following stories to potentially dash that hope against the harsh rocks of reality. Ah well. Here are some highlights from the last seven days on this crazy world wide web of ours.
Like a Well-Intentioned but Ultimately Problematic Marketing Campaign
What Happened: Procter & Gamble’s Always product line launched an advertising campaign intended to empower girls and young women faced with the message that doing something “like a girl” is a bad thing. Things didn’t necessarily go well.
Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces
What Really Happened: Always had the best of intentions when it aired its “Like A Girl” spot during last weekend’s Super Bowl with the ad above. The spot, a shortened version of an advertisement from last year, was hailed as being groundbreaking by some, and the response on Twitter initially backed that up, with the #LikeAGirl hashtag on Twitter suddenly blowing up with women supporting the campaign. And then … well, the men got involved.
Almost as soon as #LikeAGirl trended on Twitter, #LikeABoy started getting used as a hashtag, with messages including such helpful critiques as “Why not #LikeABoy?” “Seriously #likeagirl is the most insulting commercial ever and there better be a #likeaboy commercial,” and “Bashed upon for stating my views, for hopefully one day us as men can have equality and treated the same #LikeABoy #Meninist.” (Dear those who might believe that’s actually a coherent argument: Please understand that for that to happen, men would have to be placed in a societal position of implied inferiority for centuries, so much so that the phrase “like a boy” would be used as a culturally-recognized insult that needed to be reclaimed, instead of a phase concocted by crybabies who misunderstood the original campaign intentionally to further their own agenda of fear-fuelled butt-hurt.)
That’s not to say that there weren’t legitimate concerns about the Like A Girl campaign, as some have pointed out. But really: turning a campaign about reducing the shame implicit in a gendered insult into an attempt to declare yourselves the more aggrieved party? That’s not just missing the point, that’s trolling everyone involved.
The Takeaway: We can but dream that one day we’ll live in a world where someone feels the need to make a “Like A Menanist” advertisement because that term has been recognized as signifying outrageously privileged loudmouths who don’t understand that it’s perfectly OK to sit back quietly and learn from others’ experiences and not just accept their own propaganda as definitive truth. Until then, let’s hope that the Always commercial and response to same starts a conversation that can get rid of the idea that doing anything “like a girl” is a bad thing.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, You Guys
What Happened: Gawker Media tricked Coca-Cola into quoting the opening of Mein Kampf on social media as part of a prank to subvert the soda company’s attempt to lighten social media.
Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces
What Really Happened: As part of its Super Bowl promotional push, Coca-Cola launched something called #MakeItHappy, a campaign described by a company executive as “intended to disrupt the complacency that’s set in around online negativity.” The way it worked was simple: people who tweeted a message with the hashtag #MakeItHappy would get an automated response from the @CocaCola account that turned the text of that tweet into ASCII art of something cute, like a cartoon dog or maybe a balloon animal.
Of course, this kind of positivity could not stand. Enter Gawker Media, which created a special Twitter account called @MeinCoke to serialize the text of Mein Kampf on Twitter with the hashtag #MakeItHappy. Yes, the Mein Kampf written by Adolf Hitler. As you might expect, the bot behind the automated #MakeItHappy responses did what it was supposed to, and soon the @CocaCola account was posting Nazi propaganda.
Unsurprisingly, Coca-Cola quickly shut down the campaign after realizing what was happening, and released a statement in which it condemned Gawker. “Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign,” the statement read.
The Takeaway: On the one hand, the very automated nature of #MakeItHappy—and the ultimately destructive nature of so much Internet discussion—meant that this kind of thing was almost destined to happen. On the other, man. That got dark super quickly.
Make Depressing Super Bowl Ads Happen
What Happened: Nationwide thought it was a great idea to have a Super Bowl ad that made everyone all too aware of their mortality. Apparently, no one agreed.
Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces
What Really Happened: For those who didn’t see the “Make Safe Happen” ad last weekend, it went a little something like this…
Oof. That’s a sucker punch of an ad, following 28 seconds of whimsy with … well, a genuinely impressive bait-and-switch of grimness. Those watching the game certainly didn’t appreciate it, with 63 percent of Twitter mentions immediately afterwards being negative, and an informal poll of ESPN reporter Darren Rovell’s Twitter following declaring it to be the worst ad of the Super Bowl:
RESULTS: Worst 1st half Super Bowl commercial vote was unanimous http://ift.tt/1K1lxhO
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) February 2, 2015
Response to the ad was so negative that Nationwide actually released a statement on Sunday responding to the response, noting that “while some did not care for the ad, we hope it served to begin a dialogue to make safe happen for children everywhere.” (At least one father, who lost his daughter when she was four years old, disagreed.)
However, some people found a way to have fun with it. Admittedly, somewhat bleak, cynical fun, but you take what you can get, right?
The Takeaway: Given the amount of attention this ad has gotten for Nationwide, it’s possible that it could be considered a success by some marketing people. But please, please, please: Let’s not make this a trend to be followed up with bigger and “better” ads next year.
Left Shark
What Happened: Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show was filled with everything America wanted: a few hits, the return of Missy Elliott, and a couple of dancing sharks.
Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces
What Really Happened: OK, so Missy’s return proved to be a mammoth success (downloads of Elliott’s music jumped an amazing 996 percent in the hours following, according to Neilsen Music), but the real star of Perry’s performance last Sunday ended up being the dancing sharks that backed her up during one part of the show. And, specifically, the one shark that seemed to not know the routine—although there are those who’d defend those moves as an artistic choice.
Within minutes of his appearance, Left Shark was trending on Twitter, turning into all manner of memes and being defended from those who took issue with his dance routine. Hell, he was even being declared the game’s MVP by sports fans.
That Left Shark is really dancer Bryan Gaw (as he confessed on Instagram) was unimportant. By the time Perry laid legal claim on the likeness of the shark, it was clear things had gotten way larger than any one person. This is Left Shark’s world now. Well, at least until next week when no one even remembers he exists anymore.
The Takeaway: Remember when it took an accidental nipple to get people this excited about halftime shows? Does this mean we’ve evolved as a species?
Photographs Are Destroying Art! Again! Or Something
What Happened: Is it plagiarism when you take a photograph standing next to someone else taking a photograph?
Where It Blew Up: Facebook, blogs, media think pieces
What Really Happened: On the plus side, this one has nothing to do with the Super Bowl. Amateur photographer Sarah Scurr took a photograph of the San Rafael Glacier in the Northern Patagonian Ice Field while on a cruise in 2006; three years later, she entered the photograph into an online photography competition, little knowing that doing so would lead to her being accused of theft and copyright violation six years later.
And yet, that’s what happened. Scurr was accused on Facebook by another amateur photographer, Marisol Ortiz Elfeldt, who supplied her own photograph as “proof” that Scurr had stolen her image. The truth proved to be impressively mundane: It turned out that both women had apparently been on the same cruise, and snapped their respective pictures just seconds apart.
Elfeldt soon withdrew her complaint, but it was too late: critic Jonathan Jones had already taken the tiff and used it to build an argument that photography has become a “psuedo-art, with millions of people all taking pictures of the same things and all thinking we are special.” You might have thought we’d have dealt with such weirdly-archaic worries a long time ago, but apparently not.
The Takeaway: What should we take from this, exactly? The upside of seeing Elfeldt settle her dispute with Scurr so easily when faced with evidence that things weren’t as she feared, or the downside of Jones’ oddly outdated ludditism about photography, of all things? Think of it as a glass half-full, glass half-huh? situation about arguments we should have dealt with more than a century ago, perhaps.
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