Many digital moons ago, the PostSecret blog popularized the art of the internet confessional, but I'm sure the creators wouldn't have anticipated that their art project would spawn a number of imitators in the ad world.
In the age of participatory media, where 15-minutes of fame is nearly ubiquitous (I have a MySpace page, a Facebook profile, a webcam and of course this blog), the lure of the anonymous confession seems to hold plenty of appeal for both exhibitionists and voyeurs. Just one more way new technologies are being tapped to satisfy age-old compulsions. So advertisers coopted the form in the interest of engaging consumers and tapping into the public consciousness.
Arguably, Method hand soap was the first to play into our confession obsession, asking women to "come clean". Secret followed suit, prompting women visit their site "share your secret". Both tap into the confessional format to promote hygeine products and, given their very nature, come across as a bit tawdry (which isn't necessarily a bad thing given that CPG has never been a category known for edgy marketing campaigns.) If Method was first, they had the novelty factor working in their favor. Secret's approach may no longer have been novel, but it was bigger, higher profile (it even included out-of-home executions that allows consumers to text their secrets to appear on Times Square billboards.)
Well, there's a new confessional campaign running now, to promote the upcoming film Fast Food Nation, based on Eric Schlosser's non-fiction expose of the unethical business practices in the fast food industry. Well in the new media space, where constant innovation is a hardcore requirement, third time is not a charm... And in this case, the approach is ill advised and may actually work against the product.
Fox Searchlight's unbranded Do You Want Lies With That micro-site prompts visitors to confess lies they have told "as part of your job." (BTW, interesting qualifier and one that elicits such juicy tidbits as 'i told a caller my boss was out of the office when he was really sitting right there.' Ooh - scintillating.) After the visitor confesses their lie, the character voiceover reciprocates and confesses hers - that she is simply promoting a new film with an "important social message."
I've reproduced the basic flow below:
No doubt, the film has an important social message - yet the very nature of the consumer dialogue at the microsite trivializes that message by (1) comparing it to visitors own relatively minor indiscretions and (2) seems to correlate Fox's own "unethical behavior" of luring consumers into an unbranded sales pitch with the more signficant transgressions of the fast food industry (as depicted in Fast Food Nation.) Very strange...
But wait, it gets worse... Once visitors make it through this sequence, they land on the film's main web site, where it looks like someone vomited Web 2.0 all over the place. RSS feeds? Blog posts? del.icio.us tags? A Tag cloud? YouTube links? Yup - the site has them all. I've reproduced part of the page below (I cropped out the top portion of the page, which links to trailers, etc for the film) - and yes, that is a link to the ubiquitous and much maligned DiddyTV in the lower left of the screengrab.
I must confess - I found this entire approach to be wrong, wrong, wrong.
