It’s important that as an online community we learn to deliberately use our combined strength to punish companies and individuals who try to toxify our social networks with spam, lies and rubbish. We are the gatekeepers. We might not be able to stop people sending pollution into the stream every once in a while, but we can Name ‘Em and Shame ‘Em when they do. We can toxify their GoogleRank so anyone who searches for the brands or their agencies or the people who do their dirty work will find out that they have major negative whuffie.

The first company that I think needs to be shamed is Naked Communications in Sydney. They are the agency behind the appalling “Are You My Man In The Jacket?” video.

This dates back to January. This video got a lot of mainstream media coverage and then was revealed to be a fake.

This isn’t clever. This is lying. This is straight out manipulation. This is everything that’s wrong with the world of advertising and PR. What’s worse is that the agency behind it, Naked Communications, thought that their exercise in lying was justified because of the numbers.

Unfortunately, the people on YouTube have a different story. The video on YouTube has a 250,000 views and a two-star rating. Sure – lots of people saw it – but they think it’s crap. What’s worse is that most of the talk about this ad in the blogsphere, like over here on Media Bistro, is about what douches Naked and their client, Witchery, are.

Is that the kind of buzz a client wants? People talking about how much you suck?

So what do we do about it? All we can do is get the message out there, so corporate advertisers and their agencies hear us loud and clear – what we want from you is an honest and open conversation, not LIES and DECEPTION. And if you don’t give it to us, we will tell the world. Anytime anyone searches on “Naked Communications” or “Witchery” they should get a page of Google results talking about how we don’t like being lied to.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 4:33 am and is filed under Name and Shame. 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.