Jackelyn Gill

freelance writer

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Marketing gone (accidentally) wild

 

(Mildly NSFW – you’ve been warned!)

Much earlier in my career, when I was writing copy for my first corporate website, I suggested a top-level menu label called “Why I need it.”

It titled a section that talked about the risks we face when planning for retirement, and how a financial product could help us mitigate them. In other words: why someone might need what we’re selling.

That wording made it through our communications, marketing, regulatory, and legal reviews. It appeared in screenshots we shared with stakeholders. It lived for months in our documentation.

That is, until one person spoke up.

“Why I need it? What is ‘it’? You know what people are going to think when they read that?”

Sex. “It” could be sex. Yep.

Toss on those dirty mind goggles and all of a sudden we couldn’t unsee it. So off it came, to be replaced with a new, much less open-to-interpretation content.

From embarrassing to disastrous

The silver lining for me: mistakes like this happen all the time, and on much larger scales.

Remember singing sensation Susan Boyle, whose rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” took the world by surprise on Britain’s Got Talent? Back in 2012, she released her album Standing Ovation with a Twitter hashtag: #SusanAlbumParty.

Seems okay… until you remove the capital letters. Then you’re left with #susanalbumparty, which looks like something completely different. Her PR team quickly changed the hashtag to #susanboylesalbumparty, but the internet remembers.

Let’s not forget our own local claim to fame that same year, when BlackBerry (then Research in Motion) advertised they were hiring using the hashtag #RIMjobs. Tie that in with their then-URL for their career page: http://rim.jobs. If their social media team didn’t know the alternate meaning of that beforehand, Twitter was quick to educate them.

Sometimes mistakes are so bad they require damage control. Adidas sent an email to last year’s Boston Marathon runners with the subject line, “Congrats, you survived the Boston Marathon!” I assume “survived” was supposed to mean “completed.” It’s a common enough metaphor, especially considering the marathon is a difficult endurance event. But given the bombing that happened four years prior, it turned out to be a controversial choice of words.

To make matters worse, some racers were actually survivors of the attack. The Twitterverse outraged at Adidas’ insensitivity. In response, the company took the heat and issued an apology.

Though public reaction to each of these examples was quite different, they raise the question: “how did no one catch it?”

Catching misreadings, misinterpretations and mistakes

It’s tough. We can’t predict with certainty how people will read our messages 100% of the time – after all, we’re working with humans, and we’re notoriously complex beings. As much as we try to understand and empathize with our audiences, we all have our own filters over our lenses.

The saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know. And it’s hard to magically notice what we don’t see.

That said, we can take steps to open our minds and limit the possibility that our messages will land in an unintended way.

  • Actively try to interpret it the wrong way. Is there any way at all your message might be read differently? Really stretch if you need to, and evaluate whether it was hard or easy to get there. (See what I did there?)
  • Close the gaps in ambiguity. Do you use vague words like “it,” “that,” “thing,” or “stuff” a lot in your messaging? The more specific you are, the less room you leave for your audience to interpret something different.
  • Find alternate ways of reading. Physically, read it in a different setting; print instead of reading on-screen (or vice versa); remove the capital letters from your hashtag and see what you get. Mentally, imagine how someone you know well might read what you’ve written.
  • Do a grammar check. We’re all familiar with the damage a missing comma can do. “Let’s eat, grandma” becomes “let’s eat grandma.” Small mistakes can greatly change the meaning of what we write.
  • Search for slang. Urban dictionary is your friend when it comes to discovering that your perfectly innocent phrase actually means something disgusting.
  • Check your memes. Memes are born, change, and die with alarming speed. Don’t pull a Wendy’s – make sure to check that the meme you’re using is still relevant, and hasn’t been co-opted by any hate groups recently, like Pepe the frog.
  • Consider the context. The visuals and framework we put around our messaging, as well as where it physically appears, make a big difference. Got a sliding door on your company van? Think about what happens when you open and close the doors, or wind down the windows.
  • Read the news. Current events and public discourse can colour or completely change what words and phrases mean, and what’s acceptable for your audience.
  • Let some time pass. When you’re too close to something you’ve written, you start reading it in a very specific way. It’s hard to break free from that without a little bit of a breather. Come back with fresh eyes.
  • Put it to the test. Get a second, third, fourth or fifth set of eyes on your message, and specifically ask for any and all thoughts, even if it seems inconsequential to your helpers. Bonus points if you can tap some target audience members on the shoulder.

Doing this for every bit of content would be a little overwhelming, but it’ll pay dividends on your most important and highest visibility stuff (key messaging, taglines, headlines, subject lines, promotional hashtags, etc.)

You might need to weigh a few factors, like the amount of stretching you need to do, the obscurity of the offensive reference or the chances someone will draw attention to it. The important thing is this: if you recognize the potential for misinterpretation, you can weigh the risks and work around it.

Embrace your inner Michael Scott

I’m a little ashamed to admit I actually did notice that “Why I need it” was prime Michael Scott material, but brushed it off assuming my colleagues and superiors would think I was childish to make that connection. But after the fact, when I asked around a bit, it turns out others had noticed and kept quiet too… and we were silently thankful that someone had the guts to point it out.

It taught me a lesson about speaking up, and made me wonder just how many other gaffes are the result of something similar: a group of people who just let it slide so they wouldn’t be “that person” in the office.

Either way, you can bet your audience isn’t worried about looking professional in front of their boss or a client while they’re reading your message. Especially with online content. The internet has a funny way of sharing what’s unintentionally (and probably embarrassingly) hilarious – or worse.

So here’s to acknowledging it, fixing it, and getting on with writing kick-ass content.

Side note: It’s not always a bad thing

Marketers have woven humour and innuendo into their work for decades, and cheeky campaigns have generated hype by anticipating and using misinterpretations to their benefit. Just look at UK retailer Marks and Spencer and their “Putting the D in bread” ads from 2015, pointing out that their bread is a source of vitamin D.

Genuine mistake, or publicity genius? A magician never reveals their secrets, but either way, people noticed. Some argue it was a cheap and dirty way to get attention, but there’s no denying it spawned shares and jokes on social media, and enjoyed some light-hearted national coverage from major news outlets. Whether it translated into actual sales, though, I just don’t know.

If it’s right for your brand and audience (and you need to know both really well for this), a message open for interpretation is certainly an option.

Jackelyn Gill

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