Reported in April, it all began with a Greenpeace campaign blaming Nestle for the plight of Indonesia's orangutans. The group posted a parody of a Kit Kat ad showing an office worker opening a chocolate bar but biting into an orangutan's finger.
Nestle responded by forcing the ad off You Tube which only fuelled negative online comments and landed the brand in the centre of a firestorm on Twitter and Facebook. Angry consumers flocked to Nestle's Facebook page with over 90,000 fans to voice their fury. The company shockingly responded by trading insults with Facebook fans and 'unfriending' them, deleting posts and modified logos and warning users.
Once the online 'bullying' was picked up on Twitter, it went global. By the time Nestle realised its mistake and apologised, the damage was done. It surrendered and promised to cease using palm oil in May.
When Philips Electronics, in partnership with The Secret Little Agency, released a video on public reporting website Stomp in Singapore showing a bear rummaging through a dustbin in a quiet suburb at night, Singaporeans were understandably alarmed.
When the video went viral on You Tube, the sighting surfaced in local media and animals rights group Wildlife Reserves Singapore launched a search for the animal, Philips was urged to reveal that the bear was in fact a man in a bear suit.
What started out as a guerilla ad campaign for Philips' shavers ended with the electronics company facing a police investigation following the public nuisance. Philips later issued an apology for alarming the public with its publicity stunt.
In the first half of the year, KFC in China felt the wrath of an online reputation disaster following a money-off coupon initiative gone awry. The fast food chain offered coupons on its Taobao page made available for download in small batched and at highly specific times of the day. Copies soon spread virally across the internet and subsequently KFC outlets had to start turning angry customers away.
According to news reports at the time, police were called after dissatisfied customers started flipping tables and chairs and refused to leave branches for hours in protest.
In a statement KFC insisted that its was sorry for the disturbance and that customers had to prove the coupons were from an official source. The apology fell on deaf ears as agitated customers turned online to berate the brand.
After winning a pitch, Saatchi & Saatchi set out to launch a social media campaign based on the concept of a user generated viral filmmaking contest for Toyota Australia's Yaris model. After the campaign generated no entries and very few Twitter and Facebook followers, the agency sent an embarrassing email out to production houses asking for entries. The desperate email stated, "So far, NO ONE has entered and it has been open for more than 10 days and closes 1st December," followed by, "At this stage, you could enter a picture of your cat playing in his kitty litter and win 7 grand."
As if that was not enough, the winning video ended up offending many viewers with its sexism and overtones of incest. Toyota ordered the video to be taken down after people flocked online to criticise the video.
Reported in November, The Philippine Department of Tourism (DoT) was urged to withdraw its 'Pilipinas kay Ganda' ad campaign following a public outcry, allegations of plagiarism and links to a pornographic site.
Press, bloggers and senior officials criticised the logo for its striking similarity to that of Poland's National Tourist Office. Other complaints referred to the use of the local language in the tagline which makes very little sense internationally.
Grey and Campaigns, who were linked to the new campaign, were unavailable to comment at the time.
In addition to the complaints about the logo and tagline, a week before the DoT's new website Beautifulpilipinas.com was withdrawn one day after its launch due to criticism that the URL was too similar to a well-known pornographic website. The official line was that users had complained about grammatical and typographical errors.
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