Motrin proves hell has no fury like a mommy blogger

If you’ve been focused on play­ing the new war­craft expan­sion, then you prob­a­bly missed the Motrin social media back­lash over the last week. I’ll recap you.

Motrin posts a new commercial to pro­mote their drug’s ben­e­fits to mommy’s:

Mommy blog­gers all over freak and call for the death of every­one involved:

and google blog search

Motrin then apol­o­gizes and takes the ad down: www.​motrin.com

What a crazy little crisis in the ad world. I’ve been catch­ing up on the genius of Mad Men lately and how dif­fer­ent it is today. There was no way for the adver­tis­ing to get such imme­di­ate and unfil­tered feed­back on one of their ads. It shows us 3 things:

1. Social Media has power. At least in the negative

The Motrin ad was imme­di­ately picked up by Twit­ter moms and cre­ated an imme­di­ate groundswell. That google blog search pro­duced over 34k blog arti­cles that men­tion the ad. Mul­ti­ply that times 10 for the read­ers who didn’t post. And remem­ber, the ad is a week old.

2. Some big brands still aren’t using social media to listen

Motrin could have tested this ad with some key users or influ­en­tial mommy blog­gers before release and beta tested the reac­tion. Lis­ten­ing is more impor­tant than speak­ing. Baby Jesus tells us that.

3. People care about advertising. But perhaps only if you offend them

If Mad Men has taught me any­thing, it’s that really good adver­tis­ing isn’t noticed. You don’t think about the ad, you only think about the hap­pi­ness (or what­ever desired ben­e­fit) the ad por­trays. Unless of course it back­fires. Then you’re the worst com­pany ever and I’m never buying your prod­uct again.

That is, until you have a headache from car­ry­ing your baby around.