Louie the Fly campaign killed off early after plant closure backlash
Reckitt Benckiser has taken the decision to end early its Mortein ‘save him or kill him’ Louie the Fly campaign after consumers responded angrily to news of the closure of the Australian plant that makes the insect spray.
The campaign, which had reached the final phase when Louie the Fly took to the streets to win public votes to save himself, closes two weeks early. Unsurprisingly, the number of public votes has been more than enough to save Louie, although the final number has not yet been tallied.
A statement from the company on its Facebook page read:
You may have seen the announcement by the owners of Mortein, Reckitt Benckiser, about the planned closure of manufacturing in Australia. Some of you have commented on this page and your frustrations have been heard. Out of respect for the current situation I have been told that my campaign has ended. Public voting to date and online sentiment have clearly demonstrated your support for me – there’s no need to vote any further. I want to thank you all for your messages.
Today, a Facebook page had been set up called Unlike Mortein & Sacking Aussies calling on members to boycott Reckitt Benckiser products. The page already has more than 300 fans.
The result of the campaign is that the 50-year old brand mascot will remain, although the final number of votes on whether to save or kill him has yet to be tallied.
The Mortein Louie the Fly campaign began five month ago with an announcement to kill off the fly. The brand then launched a follow-up campaign to ask consumers whether or not they wanted the fly to survive.
The agencies behind the campaign were The Red Agency and Euro RSCG.
Anyone else noticed that more and more companies are now LISTENING to their consumers. Quite interesting how the power of social media has given all the people an instant voice that companies are finding hard to ignore.
Not that people haven’t complained in the past. It was just a case back then of companies filing the “snail mail” complaint in the “round filing cabinet”. No companies really cared about the odd complaint – as it almost silent.
I for one am thankful that today companies can be bought to account within days, if not hours, when they try and screw the consumer!
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Meh. Any fly spray company that takes 50 years to kill a fly isn’t much chop anyway.
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I don’t know if I can communicate, with an appropriate level of emphasis, how much I *don’t* care about Louie the Fly and his fate.
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With this campaign, the old saying “things finish how they start” springs to mind. I always thought this was a clumsy and try-hard campaign, though realise what’s happened at RB was never foreseen when they set off down this path.
For me this begs the larger question – with unmitigated disasters such as these occurring more frequently, have we taken this public engagement/participation/conversation stuff a bit too far too fast?
Notwithstanding the view that there is a limit to how much the public actually want to participate with the marketing activity of corporations, the management of client companies don’t seem to have the stomach for any wrinkles that occur once campaigns are live and set free amongst people who don’t follow the corporate line.
The easiest solution is that if you have no backbone to stand up and push back when your public engagement goes awry, then maybe just go back to basics and run a traditional media campaign that can be easily (and discreetly) pulled if things go bad for your business in the public domain.
I’m not a fan of how much of this crap is being peddled in general, and the ever-increasing number of disasters seem to support my position.
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@DMF to an extent. The manufacturing plant is still closing, isn’t it? Still jobs being lost.
Yes, inane, meaningless, self-indulgent marketing campaign ended early.
Now will consumers speak louder and clearer by truly boycotting their products? Too late to save the plant but enough to hurt their sales.
Interesting days indeed.
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So true DMF but the thing is, social media is a ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’ element of life these days. Companies can’t expect bouquets and not brickbats, and they certainly can’t expect to not respond to negativity. Lack of response only ires consumers further. Case in point: Qantas!
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If I were a competitor who did manufacture in Australia (not sure if anyone does) I’d be singing loud and strong about this fact while consumer sentiment is so strong.
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I think the only vote that needs to be taken is what made RB less palatable to the Australian public; their own Save Louie campaign or the subsequent PR nightmare.
Talk about giving yourself an uppercut, twice.
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Just throwing it out there…but do people really boycott products etc or just say they do. Is the bark worse than it’s bite?
WOuld thousands of people really stop buying mortein cos of the 190 employees laid off and a social media campaign asking people to boycott the product?
Will people buy more holdens. fords etc that are made in Australia to keep jobs going?
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@Belinda … hear hear!!
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Thank god. It was rubbish anyway.
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thank god – it was a horrible campaign
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Crap campaign, crap ads and crap RB brand manager
Here’s an idea… Why not do something NEW and fresh Euro RSCG.
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I’m disappointed, I voted to kill Louie off and thus rob the company of valued IP
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As Will Anderson said when this campaign kicked off “The reason this ad has a Fly in it in the first place is because it’s Shit”!
I’m not sure how The Red Agency are winning so many large contracts right now? Of late much of what I’ve seen from them has been cringe worthily bad. Coles latest few springs to mind for one.
Still, the fall out of this situation wasn’t something they would have been privy to when they took this gig on.
That said Reckitt Benckiser should have known better than to allow an agency to go about building it’s online social media profile for a brand over five months that they were considering moving the manufacturing of overseas! They’ve effectively built their own platform for getting mud slung at them. Frankly without this they could have almost certainly moved production and nobody except the families & friends of the laid off Mortein workers would have even known. Unless it was announced on a very dead news day, it probably wouldn’t have even made the news.
Frankly I’m not too sure who would be so bored or interested enough to goto the Facebook page of a Bug Spray in the first place. I think any person finding themselves doing such a thing should maybe instead consider drinking the contents of a Mortein bottle and ending it all. Whats next, ‘Liking’ Toilet Duck’? That is probably next, so I’ll shut up.
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Dear Reckitt Benckiser, key learning for you, save your “wanker” ads for the US market. They don’t work in Australia, especially if you’ve shafted us. And your TV talent shouldn’t scare children either (she’s one cold human). Sack your advisers or yourselves. I will never buy any of your products ever again. “Up yours”
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As someone that works in customer service I know that unfortunately most of the people that say they’re going to boycott you either never used you in the first place, or have no intention of stopping using to you.
I made a suggestion to my boss that we ban the morons taking up our time complaining from using the business. Unfortunately he rejected the idea.
And I bet most of these people complaining, fill their trolleys with 95%+ of foreign made goods when they’re are Australian made competitors on the shelf.
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@paul I agree, at the end of the day whilst there is some short term PR turmoil at RB people will quickly forget (that’s given that they even knew about it in the first place) and sales will be largely unaffected.
Australians have shown time and time again that they’re more than happy to kick up a stink about manufacturing moving offshore, but unwilling to act on it. Price is the key to the sales success to the majority of consumer goods these days – slightly ironic given that this is probably the motivator in shutting down their plant.
The one thing I don’t understand as a marketer – manufacturing plants don’t close over night and it takes months if not years of planning to put this into effect. Why the hell would you run one of your biggest social meda/ATL campaigns of recent times during the same period ?! What did you think would happen?
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Paul, I agree, I think most people who say they will boycott products are just making noise. (That said, I wish I was a Coles customer so I could stop being a Coles customer, but that is a whole different topic) .
My concern with reacting to social media is that it leaves companies open to making snap decisions based on what they think is genuine, meaningful consumer sentiment, yet for the consumer is a flash in the pan feeling that is gone as soon ad they hit post on their 140 characters.
As for Louie the fly – two categories of people there – those who want to save Louie (and might vote or like or whatever) and those who don’t care (and won’t vote). The opposite of like is not dislike, but don’t care – so the outcome was a foregone conclusion.
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Sometimes you just can’t win . . . imagine if Reckitt Benckiser had tried to OPEN an insecticide plant in West Ryde!
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Apart from the manufacturing closure, I disagree that this has been a bad campaign for Mortein.
Firstly, I don’t think the Advertising agency can be expected to know about a change in manufacturing 5 months ago when this campaign would have been planed.
Surely we need to keep in mind the obvious tone of this campaign. We are talking about an imaginary fly.
If you have looked at the FB posts on Louie’s page they are overwhelmingly positive. These are mostly from people that have grown up with the brand genuinely keen to show their support or just have a bit fun interacting with a character they have grown to love. Worth noting that this is also their target audience.
For a group of media people who are constantly talking about ‘engagement’ , ‘interaction’ and ‘connecting with audiences’ I would think a 50 year old fly spray brand having thousands of people choose what happens to their brand mascot, ticks a lot of these boxes.
I know most people who comment on this blog are preset to criticize but, lets be honest (also going against the grain for most people in PR,) surely most of us would be happy to have a campaign with this level of involvement for a product this boring.
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To be fair, I imagine this campaign was sold into client based on ‘engagement and interaction’ metrics.
Agree with Paul above on backlash. It’s completely hypocritical to denounce a brand as ruined based on backlash of 300 people whilst at the same time lamenting the poor sales follow through of 200k ‘engaged’ people
Looking at numbers and the sentiment, it’s been a pretty stunning result, especially given the amount of androgynous, expensive, unnoticeable crap that sits ignored on facebook, no doubt created by some of the negative chumps above (Sophie @ pr chicks anyone??)
It’s not really the immediate point that it may do nothing for numbers sold or that Louie was hung by his own petard. It’s the old spice argument but on a different scale
A bigger challenge for the industry who unanimously insist on ‘making it social’ is to challenge upfront whether 200k likes is the right objective for your marketing campaign. The opportunity cost for these type of brands is prob an additional 2x frequency on your TV campaign. And everyone knows how easy it is to distinguish diminishing marginal return on a TV spend
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@DNF – that is true companies do listen to consumer…to a degree. But stopping the campaign two weeks early will in no way stop the company from closing the factory in Aus and moving to a cheaper country. Unfortunately that’s profit and business in a high tax bracket country.
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So after all that fuss is he or isn’t he dead?
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I’ve been boycotting Mortein for a long time since I realised it doesn’t kill flies. Raid is much better.
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Thanks for all the comments.
I agree that a lot of the time the “we have listened to the consumer…” can be purely lip service to quell the current PR fiasco. It buys some time for the news cycle to move on for sure.
Also a fair call about the consumer being “outraged” by a companies actions – but do they maintain the rage or continue to use/buy a product/service?
I would think one example of maintaining the rage are the three ladies who are running the sackvilekyle campaign. They appear to have a considerable amount of signatures (30,000?) of people calling for companies to boycott sponsorship of Kyle & Jackie O. Although, as I have commented on other topics here at Mumbrella, do the advertisers simply move their spend around until the heat dies down?
I guess the point is that companies now have a more instant sense of feedback compared to 5-10 years ago. And as @GLaTW says, companies have to respond – if they want to play in the social media world – as to not do so just amplifies the rage.
Anyway, good healthy discussion and interesting reading. Cheers
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I had all ready decided to boycott Mortein when the louie the fly ad first appeared. Any company who doesn’t appreciate older workers doesn’t deserve my money spent on their goods. Down the track with the announcement of the closure of their Australian plant I am proved right that the company doesn’t respect their workers. Where was our government when this announcement was made that at the same time was busy with their spin on concentrating with our economy and manufacturing jobs for Australians. Funny that as all I have heard is bank jobs going overseas and Mortein to close it’s Australian plant.
I hated the Mortein ad as I found it an insult to older workers to insinuate that they had reached their used by date. I am glad that louie the fly has been saved.
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