Bring Out Your Dead

Posted by in May 13th, 2008

I expect something tasteful in a place of mourning and remembrance. Maybe I am old-fashioned but ads for LavaLife, who has never been the most subtle advertiser in the dating industry, on a site meant to be a memorial for loved ones is not what I expect to see. Imagine heading down to your local cemetery and seeing a billboard on cemetery grounds that says “Come to where mature singles click”.

What exactly is the message to the consumer? “Now that you’ve lost your loved one and are single again…”

The ad is on a site called Tributes.com which received 4.5 million dollars in funding last week, according to Wired Magazine. The site was put together by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor and is supposed to help facilitate “a new, important, way of grieving”. Makes perfect sense to display a LavaLife ad.

Now to be fair, the ad, which is posted through DoubleClick, does seem to be a remnant display. Put in rotation to target a certain segment of web property, it just happened to display on the Tributes.com beta landing page.

For me it is the perfect example of the kind of misstep marketers need to avoid.

Tributes.com is supposed to be a community where people can come together to grieve and share memories of their loved ones. Every community has a particular purpose, a particular reason people have come together to socialize. If you are a marketer representing a particular brand you should be very aware of how your message will be delivered to that community. The question of whether or not an ad is appropriate is as equally important as whether or not it is engaging.

This week’s ThoughtShapers highlighted a quote by Chris Brogan, Vice President of Strategy & Technology at CrossTech Media and social media guru, where during an interview with MarketingProfs he said, “When marketers see social media as yet another channel to drive a message down, they’re missing the boat. Worse, they’re making themselves look insensitive, unpleasant, and not worth the community’s time.”

Definitely the term “insensitive” and perhaps even the term “unpleasant” can easily be associated to the wayward placement of the LavaLife ad.

I also think there is a greater note of caution which should be heeded.

Recently when I was at the Web 2.0 Expo the exhibit hall floor was filled with companies pitching instant shake and bake communities so merchants could socialize their brand. It is the real life equivalent of an auto dealership providing coffee for its patrons. If I am there to buy a car I may well appreciate the coffee. It doesn’t mean I am going to go hang out the local dealership in place of my favorite coffee joint.

Successful communities form in an organic manner. Dressing up advertising creative to look like a community simply to get a message across is not the same as developing a true community.

With this corporate rush to embrace social media it will be interesting to see if there will be a consumer backlash. Soon we will know whether this glut of corporate social sites will be boom towns or ghost towns.