Do you know Barry Scott?

If you watch a bit of UK telly, you may recall him. He’s the shouting buffoon who, via our TV screens, introduced us to Cilit Bang, a detergent notable only because its ads looked like something that might be screened on a downmarket shopping channel.

They weren’t - they were on mainstream channels - but had no big-brand markings and none of the slickness of your Fairy or Domestos-style ads, presumably because the ad men knew we’d all think this stuff would be all the more devastatingly effective for not being a mainstream detergent.

In fact, it’s just another launch from just another big chemical company, just another example of the manipulation of our love of the whole upstart versus mainstream thing (think blogs vs MSM, early Google vs Microsoft, early Microsoft vs IBM, Ireland/Scotland in the World Cup).

Cunning admen. How subversive! How creative!

Really, it was masterful. Trebles all round. But what to do next? Well, late last year and early this, they must have noticed some online interest in their creation when the first batch of ads aired, and decided to push that along with a bit of viral advertising action.

We now move to the unlikely venue of Tom Coates’
Plasticbag blog, in the last week or so. There, regular readers there have been following, on and
off, Tom’s tentative attempts to make contact with his estranged father
(they haven’t communicated in 28 years). The big moment - when a letter
from his father arrived - finally came a few days ago. Tom wrote
powerfully about the experience on his blog.

"My eyes caught on a few sentences of peculiar grump that reminded me
all too much of myself and my clumsy mechanically articulated use of
language. And then I read it again. My first contact in twenty-eight years
with my father. Crap. Fuck. Wow. I felt… excited, I guess - like I
was on a ride. Not really happy as such. But for a moment, everything
else fell out of my head."

I
thought it was very bold of Tom to write about this deeply personal
stuff - this is not the kind of thing I’d ever do. That’s just because it’s not my bag, but I’d never rule it out for all - on a personal site, after all, why not? Newspaper columnists do this kind of stuff, for money and to a much bigger audience, all the time. Autobiographies are full of it. Friends talk to friends about this kind of thing all the time. For the same reasons, maybe it’s therapeutic for Tom. Maybe he likes the sense of support his readers offer. Maybe it’s something else. Either way, I just hoped he wouldn’t get any nasty or crass comments from anyone.

Unfortunately, the crass comment - just one - did come, among the
sympathetic and supportive contributions, from "Barry Scott".

"Hi Tom,
Always remember one thing. Life is very, very short and nothing is
worth limiting yourself from seeing the ones you love. I hadn’t seen my
father in 15 years until 2 years ago. I was apprehensive but I kept
telling myself that no matter how estranged we’d become there was no
river to wide to cross. Drop me a line if I can be of any more help.
Cheers,
Barry

… which would all be very nice, if it wasn’t posted by "Barry Scott", and if the suspicions raised by the name weren’t immediately confirmed by the link pointing to the fictional Barry’s Scott’s new marketing blog.

Oh dear. Spam’s bad enough. But individually-generated spam, trying to relate to one of the most personal posts he’s ever stuck up, just to get some linkjuice back to your marketing blog? That’s pretty low. Surely it’s a wind up?  Tom goes off in hot pursuit of the commenter, checking the IP address he finds in his blog app. He details how his chase ends up in a subsequent post.

The originating IP address is 213.86.119.210, which on some searches traces to a company and address in Kensington High Street, London. At Sam Spade, another Whois search site, it eventually leads to you Young and Rubicam, a big Madison Avenue advertising firm.

As it turns out, "Barry Scott" had also left a message on this blog - yes, this blog, gentle reader (his is the message in ALL CAPS. Nice). It comes from the same IP address.

Oh dear. It looks quite a lot like Reckitt Benckiser, Cilit Bang’s makers, or their ad agencies, think this is a good way to sell cleaning product. And it looks quite a lot like they’re about to learn what happens when viral marketing goes wrong. May they be flamed to a cinder.

But it does all raise some interesting questions. On hearing about Tom’s troubles a friend and I had a long discussion about the kind of behaviour you invite - and should expect - if you bare your soul online. She thinks that if you spill your guts online, you’re fair game for any comments that draws, even advertising messages. She thinks my position is an over-reaction.

My reaction? I’m with Danny O’Brien, who wrote a cracking essay on the nature of a particular register of voice - a public-private voice - which one adopts when writing on the public web but to a small group of friends or collaborators.

He basically says that - yes - the world could look in to your blog, but they don’t. It’s like having a chat with friends in your back garden; anyone could pass by but generally doesn’t, and so things that might sound silly out of that context shouldn’t get quoted out that context. Carrying Danny’s thesis on a bit, it seems to me to follow that you shouldn’t attempt to interject an advertising message on, or poke fun at, comments and a conversation that basically isn’t aimed at you.

If you still don’t get it, try visualising it another way: Tom’s pouring his heart out to friends in a restaurant. Spotting them, and knowing the nature of their conversation, a marketeer bounds up in a chicken outfit, seeing it as an ideal time to sell them detergent. Absurd? Yes. But to those who understand this emerging notion of public-private, the Cilit Bang team’s behaviour is just as weirdly inappropriate.

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