A cheap and dirty advertising campaign
I have been doing some research on how companies have used Web 2.0 successfully and unsuccessfully. Here’s how it shouldn’t be done:
Last year a Texas family sued Virgin Mobile Australia for using a photo of 16-year-old Alison Chang without her consent in an advertising campaign.
The slogan “Dump your pen friend” was superimposed over her image with the tagline “Free text virgin to virgin”.
The Virgin Mobile Australia campaign “Are you with us or what?” features images downloaded from Flickr and superimposed with salacious ad slogans.
These include: “There’s nothing naughty about getting callouses on your fingers”, “Novelty ring tones are the lowest form of self-expression”, and “If talk is cheap texts should be slightly slutty”
While these slogans are funny and clearly targeted at a youth market, they are damaging because the campaign was so shoddily executed.
All these images were taken gratis from Flickr accounts where users had given their images a Creative Commons attribution.
This means they consented to their images being used for creative purposes as long as they - the photographer - were credited for the photo.
The problem was, however, that Virgin Mobile Australia did not approach the photographers and inform them that they were planning to reproduce their images.
This meant that the photographers were unable to check with their subjects that they were happy for their photo to be used in this way.
In fact, the first the photographer or their subjects knew of the photos’ use, it was already plastered on billboards across Australian capital cities. It was eventually brought to their attention by fellow members of the Flickr community.
Virgin Mobile Australia has attributed the photographer in the small print of the billboard, but made no effort to notify the girl who was clearly a minor and, in fact, looked much younger than 16.
Chang’s immediate reaction to seeing her image used in this way was “I think I’m being insulted”. Of course she was. She was being portrayed as a geek.
As a result, her family issued a lawsuit. It is unclear whether they approached Virgin Mobile Australia first and were unsatisfied with their response or, as is the litigious nature of the US, jumped straight to lawsuit.
Whatever the case, they have given their daughter’s situation more airtime than if the campaign had discreetly been removed.
I was unable to find the outcome of this case so can only conclude that Virgin Mobile Australia paid an out-of-court settlement to the family and stopped running the campaign.
I think it was a very lazy, cheap and dirty campaign of Virgin’s.
