Coke’s automated #MakeItHappy Twitter promotion runs into trouble
The soda maker had to end its promotion that turned words into art after Gawker choked it with quotes from Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf.’
For anyone unfamiliar with Godwin’s law, it states that any online discourse will eventually devolve into mentions of Hitler or Nazism. Coca-Cola may not have been familiar with Godwin’s law when the brand launched its ambitious and good-spirited #MakeItHappy campaign.
The idea was for users to take negative tweets, reply with the hashtag, and then Coke would turn the negative words into something positive using ASCII art. Coke would tweet out that positive thing with the text, “We turned the hate you found into something happy. RT to make people :).”
It’s a simple idea and very on-brand for Coke, whose very existence is to make people happy. It ties into Coke’s Super Bowl ad, in which Coca-Cola spills on a server and makes the Internet a much nicer place.
That’s probably why the company pulled the plug on the campaign after Gawker (of course it was Gawker) created a tweet bot to get the Coke campaign to send out ASCII images made of text from Adolf Hitler’s book, “Mein Kampf.”
From Gawker editor Max Read:
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