COCA-COLA HAS PULLED an online promotional campaign around positivity, after pranksters used its system to tweet quotes from Mein Kampf.
For its Super Bowl campaign last Sunday, the soft drink company created a #MakeItHappy campaign which made artwork out of people’s tweets.
The idea was that Twitter users could tag negative tweets with #MakeItHappy – which would prompt a Coca-Cola account to turn that tweet into a fun text picture, like this:
Soon, the internet realised it could be abused. Coca-Cola could be made to reproduce any statement tweeted at it (albeit in the shape of a balloon animal, or a heart.)
So staffers at Gawker set up a Twitter bot called @MeinCoke, tweeting quotes from Hitler’s manifesto – and then replying to them with #MakeItHappy.
Coca-Cola duly obliged, tweeting out the quotes from its official account in the form of ASCII art.
Coca-Cola has since suspended the #MakeItHappy campaign entirely. In a statement, a spokesperson told Adweek:
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. 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.
