Moving on from the feel good factor of Virgin America and Rage Against The Machine, we bring you a case from the almighty Toyota. Now they haven't had the best of times recently and were probably hoping that their recent social media campaign could offer some light at the end of the tunnel. However, their terrible run of form continued after they recruited Saatchi & Saatchi to manage a Facebook competition for users to submit video ad ideas for the Toyota Yaris.
Saatchi & Saatchi are a global PR powerhouse, but chose to dip their toe into the pool of social media on Toyota's time with, what was considered by many, an impotent effort to engage consumers. The positioning of the campaign was misjudged and the general message was this: 'Make an effort at a rather cliched campaign and maybe win an extremely small sum of money'.
Needless to say the response rate was low and, faced with embarrassment, they abandoned the campaign. The irony is that Toyota passed up the opportunity to run the campaign with its long term partner 'Oddfellows' because it didn't have the experience to run a social media campaign. Todays mini lesson: judge your partners carefully.
