If you saw The Gruen Transfer on ABC on Wednesday night, you'll know about a crazy promotion that laundry detergent company Omo decided to try out in Brazil in August. The idea was to put GPS devices inside 50 unmarked Omo packs which would allow a team of Omo representatives to follow the unassuming purchaser home to award them their prize - which included a pocket-sized video camera and a day of "trying new things". The pretence that Omo is using to justify this promotion is that they're pushing new boundaries in advertising by taking risks, however, I think they may have pushed those boundaries just a little too far with this one.
The thing that worries me about this promotion is the fact that you have no say in whether or not you get followed home. You never ticked a box that says 'I agree to the terms and conditions'. You never signed up for anything. All you did was buy laundry detergent! Gruen Transfer panellist Russel Howcroft commented that he thinks advertising agencies are increasingly making the assumption that "there's no such thing as private". This has a lot to do with the popularity and increasing use of social networking sites like Facebook and the fact that many people are willingly putting a lot more information about themselves out there than ever before. However the difference is that even with Facebook (who recently changed their automatic privacy settings to make more of user’s information freely available), is that user’s still have the option to set their profiles to private. With this promotion there’s no button you can click to say ‘Don’t follow me home’, because you don’t even know that there’s the possibility of being followed home! That is, unless you’ve been endlessly trawling the millions of videos on Youtube and happened to stumble across this one.
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