The biggest technology companies on Earth spend billions in advertising and marketing every year. It may seem ridiculous – we may even mock them for some of the attempts that they come up with at the end of it. But the work of hundreds of thousands of advertisers the world over has been vindicated with the news coming out of the OnePlus camp today.
On Tuesday evening, the upstart smartphone company decided to start a competition to drum up interest in the brand. Fair enough – a sound idea. This contest would involve the site’s forum users (i.e. the brand’s biggest fans) taking photographs of themselves with the OnePlus logo. A decent idea, too – nothing strange here. This contest was only open to women. And whichever OnePlus selfie received the most ‘Likes’ would earn its photographer a t-shirt. Ah.
To the surprise of absolutely no one (apart from the morons who organised it), this didn’t go down well on the internet. Hell, it went down badly enough on its own forum, with a ton of members speaking out against the dated, sexist concept. Reassuringly, a number of those objecting to the premise added that they were men, too.
A OnePlus admin later posted on the forum that the contest had been pulled and that the company understood it was ‘in bad taste’. You don’t say.
Whilst OnePlus is obviously a young company, with comparatively limited resources, perhaps next time it decides to knock up a marketing strategy it might spend a little more time and a little more money to make something which doesn’t get them completely annihilated on social media. As it turns out, there is such a thing as bad publicity.
