Empowered consumers !

A couple of days ago I was relating the story of the French energy company Poweo and its viral but rather negative buzz created with a campaign featuring Chabal.

The ad was showing how Chabal was getting his strenght before a game : by plugging his fingers into the electric plug*

* he might have forgotten to do that before the France V. England game ;)

The whole French blogosphere went mad as the ad was clearly dangerous should a kid want to reproduce what Chabal was doing in the video ! Within a couple of days some "action groups" appeared on the web:

- Two Facebook Groups asking for the advert to be taken off the web (one the group had 300+ members)

- Many bloggers even went as far as creating a "Google Bombing" by linking the word "irresponsible" to the Poweo website on some of their posts !

- Many Twitters called for a ban of the ad for a couple of days.

- Altogether the French blogosphere was going mad with this Poweo ad as you can see with the graph below!

Well, guess what ? The Communication Director of Poweo wrote an email to many bloggers to let them know Poweo had listened to their worries and had decided to take off the video of the web.

I cannot say their campaign was a success as I clearly didn't approve the video however, a week ago I had never heard of them, now everyone in France was talking about Poweo and in addition to that the company was clever enough to apologize by emails to the bloggers...

Comments

[Eric]

I wouldn't call that a positive awareness linked to Irresponsability and Stupidity. I think Poweo made a huge mistake. But the future will tell us.

[osmany]

The most important thing is that now everybody knows Poweo...wasn't it the purpose ? I'm sure they knew what they did... If the advertisement was just "normal", the buzz would never have existed ! Cheers Sandrine :-*