Richard Edelman of Edelman, the PR firm that’s also responsible for GE’s Ecomagination campaign, fessed up to a big booboo. A not-so-transparent cross country RV roadtrip for a down-to-earth couple visiting WalMarts and singing its praises came to an end when it was uncovered that it was funded and orchestrated (but probably not masterminded?) by Edelman. While this foray into the 2.0 of web marketing fell on it’s face because they were playing dirty, a long time Vestal favorite has got to be Method’s Webby-winning “Come Clean” campaign.

A similar marketing attempt that backfired was the Chevy Apprentice site where netizens took action and spoke their minds with the open medium of videos provided by Chevy. The original site is now gone, but fortunately many of these culture jamming videos have been preserved via YouTube.

Fortunately though, there are new and inspiring marketing campaigns sprouting like Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, which features a slick video that’s already been archived in YouTube.

Read more on the Walmarting faux pas on Business Week and the recently closed blog Wal-Marting Across America.

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This entry was posted by Mike Lin on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 5:23 am and is filed under Design, Social Change, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.