Virgin Money Quits "Saying Yes"

Taking the blog to a more global level, Virgin Money UK's "Saying Yes" campaign backfired when they used offbeat humor Web site, b3ta.com, to promote their product. The site has a weekly competition feature known as the "image challenge."

This week's challenge says, "Let's face it: the flags used by most countries are too old to represent them today - and it's time they were updated to reflect this. So design a new flag for an old country." This is the kind of competition that got the brand into trouble. The company, related to the well-known Virgin Records, offers various financial products including credit cards, loans, mortgages, insurance, and more.

Pictured on the right is an example of the kind of feedback users will give in response to the above challenge. Twenty pages of entries filled the site, and aother moving entry can be viewed here.

So for Virgin's image challenge users were asked to come up with ideas that would illustrate the value of 'saying yes', in line with the company's current advertising campaign. Prizes such as a Sony PlayStation were offered for the winning entry.

Feedback received consisted of doctored pictures of the two Soham murder victims, estate agents boards with 'Virgin Repossessions' and an image of Branson urinating on Manuel, the site's owner.

After that, and hundreds of suggestions were sent in, walking a fine line between obscene and acceptable, the challenge was quickly pulled. A Virgin money spokesman said the site is known for its cutting edge creativity and many of the responses were very clever. He also said they expected users to make fun of the brand, but several images using young children with sexual connotations was indecent and forced them to end the competition.

Rob Manuel, who runs the site, said on a message board posting on b3ta.com that he foresaw the trouble before the idea was even released.

"Yep, they pulled the challenge, yep; they were told before they opened it exactly how it would play out; yep, they asked us to delete it and yep, I think the whole thing is funny," said Rob Manuel, who runs the site, in a message board posting on the site.

This is quite similar to instances that happened with Chevrolet and Nike when they tried to launch consumer-generated content. I'm not sure how often this happens in teh UK, but had the company done some research before their launch, I think they would have seen what has happened to brands like these and taken a little more caution. The result now is bad press which is never good. Despite the negatives, I commend Virgin Money on attempting the idea because from browsing the site, one can see the feedback is very unique. I can see how they thought it might help them, but unfortunately, consumers are not always so nice, especially to a company that would potentially deal with their money!

Money makes the world go around, but not in consumer-generated content!

Lisa


P.S. Content provided with the help of ITPro.co.uk.