I’ve been following this little story with interest. In a nutshell, ‘traditional’ advertising agency has a go at social media, gets it a little bit wrong, fumbles the recovery and ends up getting it very wrong. The agency in question is Saachi & Saachi, the client is Toyota (like they needed any more bad publicity) and the project was a simple (but terribly over-done) competition to come up with a home made advert for the Toyota Yaris.

I could try to paraphrase the entire scenario here but I found this article my Mumbrella in Australia which explains in painful detail how this came to be, the resulting fall-out and more importantly, the learnings. I found myself reading it through my fingers at one point.

As Tim Burrowes tactfully summarises;

“It’s now obvious that PR expertise is not an optional extra that ad agencies having a bit of a dabble in social media can do without. Although advertising has always had the potential to be controversial, for social media that possibility grows exponentially and that risk needs to be controlled.”

If you haven’t seen the ‘winning entry’, I suggest you read the article before watching the clip below, the lead-up makes it even more remarkable.