Kidnapped Woolies lovebirds: ambush marketing at its best?

One day after launching its now infamous Lovebirds competition, online premium kitchen tool store Yuppiechef took advantage of a typo and held the advertised site (www.woolieslovebird.co.za) for ransom.

While trying to log onto the site to check out the campaign, Yuppiechef marketing director Paul Galatis and his team noticed the typo in the marketing collateral - it should have read ‘lovebirds' and not ‘lovebird' - and saw a great way to help raise money for the company's pet charity, Soil for Life.

Ransom note

click to enlarge

He and his team put together a ransom note, and sent it to Woolworths, notifying the retail chain of its error, and asking it to match every rand donated by Yuppiechef fans between then and 14 February 2010, for the return of its lovebirds.

It almost goes without saying that Woolworths responded in good faith and with good humour. Says Woolworths social networking manager Georgina Michelmore:

“Well, accidents do happen. Certainly it could have been an expensive situation, but we considered it carefully and chose to respond to the challenge in the same way it was posed - playfully and honestly.

“Despite the learning curve, it's turned out to be just another way for Woolworths to show that we're as approachable and customer-focused online as we are in-store. Contributing to noteworthy causes is a passion at Woolworths... so we thought the Yuppiechef ‘hostage situation' was as noble as it was amusing.”

Good cause

The retail brand even allowed Yuppiechef to keep the Lovebird URL, recognising that the ransom is in a good cause - as long as there was a link at the bottom of the page leading visitors to the correct site.

To date, the ransom has raised R86 000 for Soil for Life, and Yuppiechef is aiming to reach the R100 000 mark before D-day on 14 February. Fortunately for Woolworths, Yuppiechef kindly capped the ransom at R5000, which the brand upped to R7500.

But several other corporates have so far pipped the retail brand, with the likes of Fin24, Sanlam Developing Markets, Standard Bank and Phillips donating R10 000 each. Fin24 today, Friday 12 February, issued a challenge to “all media companies, and everyone linked to the publishing industry including advertising and media agencies, PR companies and investor relations firms to dig deep and see love, and gardens, blossom this Valentine's Day through Soil for Life”.

Of course, the ransom also resulted in the production of a fair share of publicity for the campaign - a good and a not-so-good thing for the retail brand.

Choice of mechanics

Not-so-good has been the response of the very vocal twittering community. The campaign created a stir for its choice of mechanics, garnering comments such as this from Alex van Tonder, King James RSVP creative group head, on www.10and5.com: “This is a classic example of a hugely irritating ‘RT and WIN' spam campaign. The creators really should be taken to task for detracting from the twitter experience. Hopefully Woolworths learns its lesson.”

‘RT' or retweeting (for those not already on Twitter) is when someone takes an original twitter message someone else has posted, and rebroadcasts that same message to his or her followers.

Stephanie Bekink from Gloo, which created the campaign, responds by commenting that although retweeting was part of the campaign (retweeting with the hashtag gained points), no one expected followers to retweet widely as they did.

“That started to irritate people, and we can understand why. So we limited retweets to five per person, and also changed the functionality of the retweeting function, to that it would only go to that person's followers and not all followers of Woolworths,” she explains.

“Entering a conversation”

Commenting on the flame war surrounding the campaign mechanics, Michelmore adds, “As soon as you step into the social media sphere, you're entering a conversation. What you say and how you say it needs to be carefully considered and you need to do your best to uphold the etiquette and best practices of the space.

“It's brand new territory for most brands, but even more so for one operating in a developing market like South Africa. We naturally had the best intentions and sought to act responsibly when we developed the campaign. When even a handful of people expressed they were less than pleased with certain elements [of the campaign] we responded as quickly as we could.”

And that, ultimately, is all that one can ask from a brand. The fluidity of the social networking arena represents both danger and opportunity for any brand brave enough to enter. Here be lovebirds dragons.

Updated Friday, 12 February 2010, at 3.42pm