Trashvertising: How Brands Are Creating Outrage For Explosive Growth
The dichotomy of the 21st century is that we take things at face value but mistrust everything.
Public opinion of established brands is at an all-time low… We all believe in the soulless, corporate monster that will feed on our data and exploit everything around them to continue growing profits.
Over the last few years, there’s been a number of “mishaps” made by brands.
With the collective sentiment towards large brands - we’ve all been too ready to believe it…
If a brand does something that’s ethically considered wrong, we take it at face value, we shake our collective heads in acknowledgment that you can’t trust these brands in the slightest.
We buy into the narrative… But something iffy is going on.
Brands are smartly exploiting this dichotomy to fuel explosive growth…
Ask any marketer and they will tell you that there are few better engagement drivers than outrage. And of course, we all know that all publicity is good publicity.
When Ryan Holiday wrote ‘Trust Me, I’m Lying’ and told us all about his exploits working for Tucker Max, American Apparel and others. He was just the first.
Today the same tactics work better than ever, we trust brands less than ever and the playbook is simple.
Create a distasteful ad, release it and feed it up the chain.
In 2017, Pepsi released a now infamous advert featuring Kendall Jenner.
This sparked outrage and created a “publicity crisis” for Pepsi.
Suffice to say that this outrage garnered a lot more attention than the advert would have had if there was nothing wrong with it.
What about the Nivea White Washing Scandal? (Also in 2017).
It’s fair to say it got a fair bit of attention, and that’s just one celebrity addressing the advert.
Now let’s consider where the most value is in doing this for a brand such as Nivea.
What about if we look at how this helped them with their Search Engine Optimization?
We can see that when the publicity culminated, the parent site gained over 1,000 new Referring Domains.
If you know anything about SEO you’ll understand the insane value of this… A single link can improve your rankings on sites like Google and Bing. Some keywords can be worth tens of thousands worth of revenue to a business per month.
The same month Dove jumped on the bandwagon.
And the search result?
Keep in mind that both Dove and Nivea have multiple different websites for different geographical locations. So this only accounts for a percentage of all links gained.
And clearly, this is an issue. Brands are not only saying and doing bad things, but they’re actually being rewarded for doing so.
We pay attention to it, and we interact and that makes it worthwhile to them.
Coincidence that the two brands made the same mishap in the same month? I think it’s very unlikely.
Brand Company recently featured an article on Medium titled; Brand Purpose Is A Lie.
In which they covered a new ad by Gillette which has caused controversy.
The advert in question caused issues as Gillette have traditionally been a tad sexist. And continue to be with their Female line of razors.
Trashvertising? It’s hard to say. It could just be bad marketing, it could be a play to get even more attention. The result is the same.
Over 2.5 million results in around a month since the ad was released.
It’s clear that brands have found a way to get even more value out of their advertising.
For lack of a better word, I’ve been calling it Trashvertising.
In essence, that’s what it is… But in results for the brands it’s far from trash advertising, it’s a gold mine.
