Lost boys, lost diaries and other marketing mistakes

When Hannah Stringer saw the poster along Commercial Drive, her heart sank. There, stuck forlornly to a lamp post, was a homemade, photocopied plea for help. "LOST," it announced, above a hand-drawn sketch of a journal. "My personal diary and my constant companion. It's a little collection of all my gems of wisdom from the past year." A note at the bottom asked anyone who found it to tweet its owner, David Wicken.

An empathetic sort - she is a nanny who currently cares for two toddlers - Ms. Stringer, 32, wanted to help. "I felt so bad for this guy because he said it's his personal journal," she said, "and I just envisioned people reading it out loud and mocking it. I thought: 'This poor guy!' "

She wasn't alone. All around downtown Vancouver, people spotted similar posters and wished they could help. Then, on Monday, something amazing happened: Ms. Stringer was strolling with her charges back from a play gym when she spotted something wedged between a couple of parking meters at 12th Avenue and Main Street, more than three kilometres away from where she'd seen the poster. "I thought, 'There's no way this was the journal.' But I picked it up and realized: 'Oh! It is!' "

A moment later, she was crushed. Opening the diary, she realized it was actually a piece of guerrilla marketing from the Okanagan winery Sumac Ridge, an obviously mass-produced volume featuring recipes, photographs and musings about life. What she didn't know was that, in the surrounding streets, 1,999 other copies of the diary lurked in semi-visibility, waiting to be found and exchanged for a $13.99 bottle of Sumac Ridge's Gewürztraminer at a tweet-up next Wednesday. David Wicken, who is identified on his Twitter feed as an assistant wine maker, isn't even a real person.

"That's so uncool," declared Ms. Stringer. A wine drinker, she added that she would go out of her way to avoid Sumac Ridge from now on.

It's been a rough couple of weeks for the cause of edgy marketing. Last week, Mr. Sub pulled a TV ad it had just rolled out after a few gay activists complained of homophobia. Even though the sandwich shop had approved the ads before they went on air, it fired Bos, the agency responsible for the creative. Around the same time, PepsiCo. managed to turn a minor misstep over alleged sexism in its AMP iPhone app into a blazing fiasco by taking to the twittersphere and spreading the news of its own controversy.

But neither had the potentially lasting effect of another major event that transfixed millions of TV viewers last week. If allegations by the Larimer County sheriff are correct, the balloon boy event brought to us by the Heene clan of Colorado (with unwitting assistance from hundreds of journalists) was a publicity - that is, marketing - stunt aimed at landing the family a reality TV show. Will it have the same effect as the boy who cried wolf, prompting us to increasingly mistrust our neighbours and even our own emotional responses to events we witness?

Events and campaigns like the Sumac Ridge effort "percolate down into the very framework of day-to-day interaction, and day-to-day experience," says Bernard McGrane, an associate professor of sociology at Chapman University in Southern California who has extensively studied the effects of advertising on society. "We've become hair triggers with cynicism and skepticism."

That mistrust is one reason marketers are trying untraditional tactics. "The most effective and brilliant ads are the ones we don't prejudge to be ads," Prof. McGrane adds. "These are all assaults, attempts to get our attention through the back door, hacking our emotional hooks.

"We're technically more adept at turning on that switch that says: 'Whoa, I'm being marketed to.' And yet, our basic emotional structure is not going anywhere. 'What - there's a six-year-old lost kid?' That's where advertising lives: the intersection of the human emotional palette and the exploitation of it."

Todd Sieling, a 39-year-old who works in new media, found one of the Sumac Ridge diaries and immediately tweeted David Wicken. Only later did he realize he'd been hoodwinked. (Actually, he used the word "punked.")

"My attempt to be a good guy made me the mark," he said bitterly. "There was a little bit of a bait-and-switch. These sorts of little social graces that we give each other in situations like this are the things that knit our society together. So to hack them for the purposes of marketing just didn't feel right."

He added, from a professional perspective: "They're breaking one of the first rules of social media marketing, which is to be genuine. I'm not even sure David is a person." Told he was not, Mr. Sieling replied, "I feel double-punked."

True, to some extent it has always been thus. "There's an old expression," says Richard Bingham, a professor of creative advertising at Humber College's school of media studies. "If you're not pissing off somebody, you're not talking to anybody."

And it's true, most of those who have found the David Wicken diary seem to like the promotion. (Incidentally, it too was created by Bos.)

But in some cases, all it takes is a handful of angry tweets to get skittish marketers to back down.

While advertisers have always had trouble breaking through clutter, Prof. Bingham notes that the segmentation afforded by new media and new techniques is enticing some marketers to take their advertising to extremes that their target audiences might like, but that might upset others. And consumers seem ever more likely to take offence to marketing these days, in part because ads are passed around virally, falling outside of the target audience. "The ad that plays late at night because there's an issue about it now is available 24/7 on YouTube," Prof. Bingham says.

"One of the interesting things about viral is that it's non-reproducible," he adds. "As a result, people are trying a really wide range of things in the hopes that something goes [viral], because nobody can predict it."

But marketers need to step carefully even as they reach for extremes. "The long-term issue as citizens is one of trust," Prof. Bingham says. "Do we have to be skeptical of every single piece of communication that comes at us from every angle?"

He sighs, and considers the answer: "Sadly, probably yes."

"I think, though, that the marketers who will ultimately be successful will be the ones that pay off the trust once they've established it. But they must understand, if they screw up, they'll be burned so fast."