You'd have to be living under a rock in a fishbowl to not have heard about this week's dead fish fiasco. Advantage SA sent a few goldfish bowls complete with goldfish to various media companies around Australia with 'Be the big fish in a small pond and come test the water' printed on the side. Turns out a lot of the fish didn't pass that water test and they kicked the bucket. And of course, the media were onto it like a great white gnawing on a surfer's leg.
Ironically, the campaign has now captured way more attention than it would have if it had all gone smoothly, which begs the question, embarrassment aside, could this campaign actually be considered a success? I've heard stories of people planning a crisis so they can implement a crisis management plan and ride the waves of publicity off the back of it. Vegemite's iSnack 2.0 or whatever the hell it was called was most likely one of those times. Not exactly genius, but it certainly generated heaps of press and there probably wasn't a person, or goldfish, in Australia that hadn't heard of the product by the time they renamed it something much more sensible and less controversial. Romania's recent 'Rom chocolate bar' is another example of one done incredibly well and is definitely worth checking out if you haven't already seen or heard about it.
The challenge is, of course, to get the coverage without actually damaging your brand. Let's be honest here, having your CEO being sued for trying to shag one of the girls at work probably didn't do wonders for David Jones. So clearly, like most marketing, there's a nack to getting it just right.
Let's not forget the other important lesson from all this. Boring gets ignored. Every. Single. Time. A goldfish may not have been groundbreaking stuff, but at least Advantage SA made an effort to do something interesting that would get noticed. OK, it ended up getting noticed for all the wrong reasons, but you know what? Stuff happens. When you try something different, when you push a boundary here and there, sometimes things go wrong and innocent goldfish bite the big one.
Although if we're being fair, it's hardly a "stunt gone wrong" as reported by the papers. If they'd forced a goldfish to jump 24 buses while riding a motorbike and he'd died in the process, now that would have been a stunt gone wrong. This was something else entirely. It was someone having a go and it didn't quite work out. At least not as intended. Obviously it's worth thinking through anything you do properly, but the truth is we still need to take risks and it makes me sadder than the GPA (Goldfish Protection Association) to think that some people shy away from having a crack just in case something like this goes wrong.
Because no matter how hard we try, how much we plan and how careful we are, in one way or another, we're all likely to kill a few goldfish along the way to getting the results we're looking for.
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