Motrin Wins Social Media Marketing Campaign Of The Year

On Saturday, Motrin posted the ad below:

What followed was a viral social media response that most marketers can only dream about.

In just 48 hours they had:

• Over 100,000 views on YouTube for both their ad, along with all the video blog responses to their ad
• Number 1 (motrin) and Number 2 (motrinmoms) topic trends on Twitter, according to Twitter Search.
• Over 8,000 individual blog posts about the ad and Motrin itself according to Technorati.

Additionally, they had the undivided attention of many of the leading pundits in the digital marketing blogosphere, including Seth Godin, Jeremiah Owyang, Brand Flakes, Adfreak, ReadWriteWeb, Hard Knox Life, David Armano, Frank Martin, The Consumerist, Adrants, Mashable, Viral Blog, Peter Kim, Adverganza, Brand Experience, Rogue Agency, and many more.

Now to the fine print:

This social media marketing campaign was all a big, unintended mistake.  And as you may guess, the overwhelming response was negative.

Motrin is now backpedaling, pulling the ad from their site, posting apologies all over the place, and they and their agencies are probably in an all points scramble mode.

Which is all too bad, because, if you just looked at the response numbers, Motrin had a lock on social media marketer of the year with this one.