Taxi gives Motrin a headache

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I’ve been say­ing a lot lately how social media basi­cally helps mar­ket­ing suc­ceed or fail faster. In a timely tes­ta­ment, a Motrin cam­paign is giv­ing us a les­son in what hap­pens when you fail.

The Motrin site, which was taken down at about 9:20pm Sun­day night, tar­gets new moms suf­fer­ing from car­ry­ing their new­borns in slings and such. It even offended me. Partly because I’ve been an equal par­tic­i­pant in the behav­iour char­ac­terised in the ad. And partly because it’s weak creative–not Taxi’s finest hour.

  • It shows the strat­egy instead of com­ing up with an insight
  • The insin­u­a­tions are ignorant–‘babywearing’ is in fash­ion? What did ancient cul­tures around the world use for their baby-carrier pain in the days before Motrin? 
  • It insults moms (and dads) who of course see baby car­ri­ers as lib­er­at­ing because they help them get out 

I’ll let you get the story of how this con­ver­sa­tion spread at Mash­able, which went live as I was typ­ing this.

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View Comments to “Taxi gives Motrin a headache”

  1. sjfbarnett says:

    is it wrong that I noticed the design before the con­tent? It’s very Jar­rat Moody…

    http://​ca​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​H​e​P​W​B​N​cugf8

  2. And the lessons keep coming.

    @Sonya, turns out you noticed the graph­ics before the con­tent because they were aft­fully ani­mated by one of the world’s hottest motion graph­ics squads–none other than Meldmedia.

    While I’m busy real­iz­ing how social media is shrink­ing the world for mar­ket­ing, I for­got what a small world the design com­mu­nity is–Meld are our bud­dies from next door.

    Did I men­tion the visu­als are smashing?

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