I think it’s safe to say that social media has taken over almost everyone’s life.
How many times a day do you open Instagram or Facebook casually just to see what your friends are up to? I know I’m on there at least 20 times a day mindlessly scrolling and brands are smart, they’ve caught on to this behavior.
That’s why while you’re scrolling through your friends post you’re likely to see a brand’s pop in there every so often.
Typically they’re easy to pass over, but then there are some that really catch your attention. that’s the whole goal, right?
But, what if they catch your attention for the wrong reason? Like offending your values or making you feel totally alienated from their brand?
Brands, big and small, make mistakes on social media all the time and in today’s age, they are certainly never forgotten.
1.Would You Rather: Rihanna
Ever since they updated their layout and upset almost all of their users, Snapchat has been losing popularity.
One feature of the new update is the prominence of more ads. Now, as you’re viewing stories, brands ca interject their ads between each user. Typically, they keep it to brands that are relevant to you, but then there’s this ad for a game called Would You Rather?:
The ad asks users if they’d rather Slap Rihanna or Punch Chris Brown, which directly relates to the domestic abuse case from 2009 where Chris Brown physically assaulted Rihanna.
With users already criticizing Snapchat because of their recent updates, the backlash from this was huge! Snapchat removed the ad and then issued this apology “The advert was reviewed and approved in error, as it violates our advertising guidelines. We immediately removed the ad last weekend, once we became aware. We are sorry that this happened.”
Even with the apology usage of the app is still on the decline and taught us the valuable lesson to be careful of crossing the line between funny and hurtful.
2. Dove: Transformation
Normally, Dove is known for empowering women and focusing on natural, realistic standards of beauty.
The company has been standing on its Real Beauty platform for over 10 years and, most of the time, it’s proven successful. Take, for example, successful campaigns like “Real Beauty Sketches” and “Evolution” that focus on making women feel proud of the way they look.
Unfortunately, in a recent post on Facebook by the company, they’ve taken a ton of steps backward.
The ad in question shows a black woman transformed into a white woman after using Dove body lotion.
This totally goes against their brand message of saying that all beauty is real beauty by showing a woman transforming into an entirely different race after using their product.
It doesn’t fit with their overall brand messaging and both alienates and insults a large part of their audience.
After receiving backlash from women of all races saying the ad made them angry and uncomfortable, Dove removed it from Facebook and released this statement:
As we’ve seen with all the other ads, the apology doesn’t do much but the ad does teach us to always review your content through a critical lens. Make sure that it doesn’t offend or in this case, totally go against what your brand represents.
3.New York Times: Snake People
The New York Times is known for being one of the top newspapers in the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s exempt from some social media fails.
As a top newspaper, you would expect them to be on their game, triple checking all content before publishing. Well, that wasn’t not the case for the article, “President Trump’s Exaggerated and Misleading Claims on Trade,”
The editor who worked on the article has a browser extension called “Millennials to Snake People,” which changes the word “millennials” to “Snake People,” which means every time the word millennial was referenced in the above article, it was changed to the phrase snake people causing a lot of people to be utterly confused as they read the article.
The article with the errors was released exclusively online across the company’s social channels making it an easy target for criticism.
The New York Times and the editor himself issued an apology on Twitter
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