Quality Assurance Fails When Coca-Cola Tweets Excerpt From Mein Kampf

Coke received a lot of flack when their #MakeItHappy Campaign inadvertently tweeted an excerpt from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” Coke ultimately terminated the campaign, but not before Gawker cashed in on the prank.

As Quality Assurance at R/GA, we challenge ourselves through out-of-the-box thinking to learn from mistakes, even when they are not our own. If we were launching this campaign, we would recommend the following:

1. Profanity Filter: The campaign would have to exclude words that are off-brand. The filtered list must be approved by the client.

2. Re-order text: Scramble the text to erase the negative tone of the original message.

3. Inject text: Randomly add approved words to make the original text no longer make sense, adding whimsy and humor to the text. “I don’t like going to school!” -> “I sang don’t green pandas like flirty birds going hopscotch to surfboarding school!”

4. Remove letters: Remove random letter so the negative text is no longer readable, but still allows users to recognize where text originated.

5. Change negatives into positives: Reform text to spell positive, on-brand words.

6. Gamification: Increase engagement and virality by converting the text into an interactive game experience.

Idea 1:

Instead of displaying the original text from “Left to Right” making it legible, I would recommend we display the original text from “top left” going down to “bottom left” and moving right so the words are less legible but still apparent to the user. I would suggest a second algorithm that forces the available text to line up from left to right that would spell words that are on-brand to Coke that they can approve such as “happy”, “love”, “fun”, “awesome”, “special”, etc. These would be bolded so that they stand out to viewers. This would allow users to still see that the original negative text was used, while making it obvious that it was converted to more “positive” text.

Idea 2:

On a webpage, create animation that takes actual words from the tweet and animate showing the letters breaking apart and recombining (not in order) as the cute ASCII image.  Similar to the above, letters can be repositioned into “positive” brand approved words. The final transposed image will be tweeted with the link to the webpage animation.  For engagement, you could turn the final animation image into a sharable word search puzzle for brand appropriate words further re-enforcing the idea that the negative words are being engaged in a positive way.