The Messiness that is Social Media Marketing
So the MadMen characters' Twitter accounts were turned back on after a bit of confusion last weekend. It appears that AMC's online marketing team at Deep Focus chatted with the AMC team and convinced them that "everything was cool". As much as it is being argued that these are "fan generated" they do seem to have an amazingly coherent voice with the show and one wonders if they might not in fact be agency/production/marketing generated. No matter, they are an interesting experiment/extension and I'm interested to see how they evolve and survive over time.
That all said, there does seem to be an expansion of the number of characters twittering, including several that one has to question the "reality" of them actually using twitter. Would Betty Draper (@bettydraper) or Francine Hanson (@francine_hanson) have really used twitter? One of the nice things about the usage within the agency was the rate of adoption and difference in usage patterns. To suddenly have the crew of characters from outside that community join and adopt in full force makes me wonder about the faithfulness of the adoption to the character profiles. Betty's character is not exactly prone to discussing things in public -- at a minimum her account should have been set to private, a bit of a party line that you'd have to ask to join.
But this is a grand experimental world we're all playing in, so I can't fault those behind this experiment too much. It will be interesting to see how this all resolves.
The other odd thing from this is the appearance of several Twitter accounts of real but deceased individuals from the MadMen era. Bill Bernback has appeared as (@billbernbach) with tweets referencing Don Draper. This is a bit of a tread into dangerous territory, especially if it is agency/marketer conducted, as the estate of Bernbach and the current DDB Legal team probably have some serious issues with this.
So where does the line get drawn?
All things to ponder for the lawyers and practitioners...and all things I will ponder here in the coming weeks.
Thoughts?
That all said, there does seem to be an expansion of the number of characters twittering, including several that one has to question the "reality" of them actually using twitter. Would Betty Draper (@bettydraper) or Francine Hanson (@francine_hanson) have really used twitter? One of the nice things about the usage within the agency was the rate of adoption and difference in usage patterns. To suddenly have the crew of characters from outside that community join and adopt in full force makes me wonder about the faithfulness of the adoption to the character profiles. Betty's character is not exactly prone to discussing things in public -- at a minimum her account should have been set to private, a bit of a party line that you'd have to ask to join.
But this is a grand experimental world we're all playing in, so I can't fault those behind this experiment too much. It will be interesting to see how this all resolves.
The other odd thing from this is the appearance of several Twitter accounts of real but deceased individuals from the MadMen era. Bill Bernback has appeared as (@billbernbach) with tweets referencing Don Draper. This is a bit of a tread into dangerous territory, especially if it is agency/marketer conducted, as the estate of Bernbach and the current DDB Legal team probably have some serious issues with this.
So where does the line get drawn?
- Is impersonating fictional characters as a fan "OK" in the name of audience engagement?
- Does it matter if there is a formal agency or producer approval?
- Does said approval need to be public?
- What about impersonating figures from history?
- Is the situation different if the impersonation is related to a commercial project vs a non-profit or personal project?
- Is it any different if the figure is from long ago vs recent history (think Charlemagne vs JFK)?
All things to ponder for the lawyers and practitioners...and all things I will ponder here in the coming weeks.
Thoughts?
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Everything is fair use unless they catch you. And even if they catch you, there's PR involved. The larger question is: how many laws do you have to bend -- or estates do you need to aggravate -- in the name of getting people to watch a TV show?
Of course, the more questionable the approach, the more appropriate for the theme of the show, no?