What began as an innocent Twitter marketing campaign from Coca-Cola turned ugly this week and eventually had to be dropped altogether because of a Gawker trick. When the site discovered that the campaign forced Coca-Cola into quoting Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Gawker tried to see if they could get Coke to do it again and it worked.
Coke’s #MakeItHappy campaign was launched during the Super Bowl on Sunday. It encourages Twitter users to reply to a negative tweet with the hashtag #MakeItHappy. Coke then turns the message into an ASCII drawing of something cute, like a mouse or a Coke-drinking chicken leg.
On Monday, one showed up on Coke’s official Twitter account that turned a line from Mein Kampf - “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children” - into a balloon dog. This quote is known as the “14 Words” slogan among white nationalists.
Gawker noticed it, so they had Gawker Editorial Labs director Adam Pash create a Twitter bot called @MeinCoke that only tweeted out lines from Mein Kampf. Then, they replied to each tweet with #MakeItHappy to see if the Coke algorithm picked up the messages.
Viola! It worked. Coke started tweeting out quotes from Hitler as cute ASCII drawings.
Before the situation got even worse, a Coke spokeswoman told AdWeek that they pulled the campaign and were disappointed to see what happened.
“The #MakeItHappy message is simple: The Internet is what we make it, and we hoped to inspire people to make it a more positive place,” the spokeswoman said. “It's unfortunate that Gawker is trying to turn this campaign into something that it isn't. Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign.”
This just illustrates how brands need to just take one more second to think about a Twitter campaign before they launch it. Coke could have asked the New England Patriots about that.