I love Pink Floyd as much as anyone, but Roger Waters just doesn’t seem to get viral marketing. Yes, you want to get people talking about you…but usually, it helps if they are saying nice things.
Water’s new viral marketing campaign got people talking all right…specifically, it got fans of deceased singer-songwriter Elliot Smith talking, but they didn’t have much of anything nice to say about Roger Waters or Pink Floyd once they found out his team of street artists inadvertently defaced Smith’s memorial.
To promote an upcoming Pink Floyd reunion tour, Waters paid street artists to wheat-paste the following quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower on various walls in cities across the US:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
So far so good, right? Well, except for the fact that the Los Angeles team pasted the quote and an accompanying picture right on top of Smith’s unofficial memorial, covering up tributes from his fans.
Not a good move. Opinion was actually a bit divided over whether Smith would have liked the quote/sticker or not, but there’s nothing like an old-guard rock singer appearing to disrespect a young, deceased, indie singer-songwriter’s memorial to unleash mass amounts of righteous hipster outrage.
For his part, Waters said it was an accident. The LA Times quoted his apology:
“It was absolutely an accident,” Waters said. “I didn’t want to disrespect Elliott Smith’s fans, and I’ve instructed (the team) to remove the wheat paste immediately. It was a random pasting in the normal course of this, and I want to make it public that we had no intent to offend or cover up something precious.”
This incident provides a handy demonstration of the reason why most social media “gurus” advise you to “listen” before you jump in and start participating: you don’t want to end up inadvertently sticking your foot in your mouth. Obviously, the “listening” step is just as important for viral marketing efforts that start in the street as it is for viral marketing efforts that start online.
