What Happens When Digital Media Goes Wrong - Horribly Wrong

Nothing. 

Nothing is wrong unless...

Unless you're a big Danish bank AND your traditional marketing agency used professional models to stage provocative pictures (used in television commercials) when your publicly stated goal was:

...to restore trust in the Bank and ensure that we live up to our new vision of being "Recognised as the most trusted financial partner."¹

Even worse, your marketing agency staged photos of the “Occupy” movement and used them in your commercials...
your Bank commercials…
your Big Bank commercials.  

And your marketing agency did all of this in a country where a lot of people still blame your Big Bank for much of the financial meltdown.

AND THEN, your bank commercial goes viral via social media and gets negative feedback to the Nth degree ..

AND FINALLY (apparently), no one, not you or your fantastic, award-winning huge marketing agency, knows what the Hell to do about all that negative social backlash.

So what, right?  Agencies use professional photos for client marketing work all the time.  But this branding campaign had some major issues front-and-center (that we outlined above) and while we Geeks don’t want to get into the weeds of advertising, we can’t address the social fail here if we don’t provide some background.  Here's the rest of the set-up:

1. "The new normal" was the slogan.  This big bank wanted Danes to recognize that it knew the world had changed-- and that it, the bank, had changed too.  Okay, it was an image campaign, branding.  Should be easy, right?
2. In addition to (staged) video showing hundreds of pink-masked workers on assembly lines  (think: Apple) and images of various protesters, the bank used models for all its photos including its "Occupy" images.  Danes were particularly scornful of this ironic "co-opting" of the Occupy ideology.²
3. The bank has zero women on its board, making the (staged) photo of the Member of Parliament with her child, all the more inauthentic and hypocritical in the eyes of many social media commenters.
4. This bank, claimed hundreds of commenters across social media networks, "closed branches in small towns, refused loans to small businesses letting them go bankrupt instead" and (according to AdLand) is still seen as "one of the larger faults of the housing market crash in Denmark."¹

So where did this marketing strategy’s actual execution leave the “Big Danish Bank”?  On social media it led to its being widely panned (and we’re being kind).  Outrage, indignation, sarcasm and biting commentary were the inevitable result.  The bank's Facebook page blew-up

Sure you can call it new standards when you move 300 jobs to Litauen
- read one angry post. 

I would just like to say that the advertising agency that has made the advertising for you have [has] done a disservice to the DB [Danske Bank]
- reads another. 

Anybody who “Liked” the campaign was immediately branded either a troll, an employee, a sell-out, or worse.   (We’d share pics but we had to let Bing translate everything for us.)  What was Danske Bank’s response?  Crickets.  Nothing on Facebook.

Meanwhile, the social media outcry got so loud that the mainstream Danish press picked it up. 

Hey bankers, do you think we've forgotten that you are the über-bad guys?
- blared Politiken’s headline. 

..it is rare for an ad to get my blood boiling. But the new campaign from Danske Bank is like being kicked in the balls. - wrote respected Danish freelancer and editor, Jesper Nykjær Knudsen.

There’s more but we think you get the point.  Ultimately, as of the writing of this article, the bank has lost 10,000 customers since April and poor CEO, Eivind Kolding, had to meet with Occupy movement representatives in Denmark and apologize for “co-opting imagery from the group's protests against the finance industry as well as for the bank’s role in the financial crisis.” [Peter Stanners, The Copenhagen Post, Dec. 20, 2012]  Can you say: Social Media FAIL?

What started as a typical image campaign by a major advertising agency, went viral because of social media.   And when your campaign goes viral on the negative side of the spectrum, it’s usually due to lack of authenticity and poor management of social networks.  Ignoring comments on Facebook is bad enough but ignoring the negative ones is probably the biggest mistake a brand can make.  (To be absolutely fair, in the case of this bank, a poor understanding of market sentiment likely exacerbated the problem with the underlying strategy.)

Bottom Line:  If your brand decides to greenlight a “cutting edge” campaign like this one, you’d better have a crisis management team of social media people ready-to-go.  And you’d better be wiling to engage commenters and haters.  And for Pete’s sake, use some real people!

¹Danske Bank's "New Normal" provokes punters by using Occupy imagery, by dabitch, AdLand.tv. Read more at http://adland.tv/adnews/danske-banks-new-normal-provokes-punters-using-o...

²Remember, Denmark is a country that has enjoyed a free school system, including college, free medical care, income support and generous unemployment benefits for longer than most of us have been alive.  So while the current government is a mix of both liberal and conservative ideology, its social systems are perhaps more in-line with an Occupy protester than a financial institution.