Marketing fail of the week 😳

Hey! Welcome to the latest Growth By Social 🌱 where we’re talking about:

📱 This week’s social media news 

❤️ My favorite social posts of the week

🥤 Coca Cola’s Recycle Me campaign

🐓 Chick-fil-A’s major social media fail

First up…

Your social media news roundup 📱⤵️

🤖 Meta has released an AI chatbot, which users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger can use. This is available in each app’s search bar and you can ask the AI chatbot ‘anything’.

🎟️ TikTok has partnered with ticket seller, AXS, so you can buy show tickets directly in-feed! An exciting time for artists on the platform! 

📢 Meta is looking at using AI to mimic influencers’ and celebrities’ voices (if they consent, of course!), enabling them to answer comments and DMs using a chatbot as if it were them speaking.

💰 LinkedIn is apparently testing a ‘Premium Company Page’ subscription option.

❤️ My favorite social posts of the week

This is why we love WRITTEN word 🤷‍♀️

Pretty spot on 😆

The ADRENALINE RUSH this gives you though…

Let’s move on to some more marketing news making the headlines recently…

🥤 Coca Cola’s Recycle Me campaign

Working with marketing and PR agency, Oglivy, Coca Cola has launched a new campaign to encourage soda drinkers to recycle cans.

The eco-conscious campaign, ‘Recycle Me’, delivers a series of images of the Coca Cola logo. But each one has a unique look - it’s the logo after it’s been crushed by consumers during the recycling process.

All of the images are very simple but cool, and what I love is that the agency didn’t use Photoshop or AI to generate them. They actually used a variety of techniques including mechanical presses and vacuums to mimick the different ways you can crush a Coca Cola can before recycling it.

Also shows how recognizable the brand’s logo is - it’s still obvious whose ad it is even when the logo is crushed!

🐓 Chick-fil-A’s major social media fail

Picture this - you have an employee who creates engaging and positive content for your brand. We’re talking MILLIONS of views and thousands of likes, comments and shares.

What do you do?

Probably not what Chick-fil-A did this week 👇

MiriTheSiren is an employee of the fast-food chain, Chick-fil-A, and she started posting food reviews on TikTok during her breaks to showcase what she eats as an employee, as well as to promote new menu items.

Often racking up millions of views - like the most recent one which, at the time of writing this, has over 3.4M.

But Chick-fil-A (very controversially) put a ✋ STOP ✋ to MiriTheSiren’s videos and told her she could no longer post about the brand and its products.

The TikToker put out an explainer video that attracted thousands of comments from upset fans who were sad that she would no longer be posting these kinds of videos anymore.

Until…

Another fast-food restaurant chain, Shake Shack, took the opportunity Chick-fil-A should have snapped up a while ago!

They’ve teamed up with the content creator to post the same style of vids on the platform, but for their products instead. EEK!

Instead of collaborating with MiriTheSiren (a ready-made brand ambassador!) and co-creating content, they’ve let a competitor swiftly take their place and reap the rewards of having a very talented content creator and her huge following on board.

Interesting move from Chick-fil-A - I fear this is a big MISS and their executive team will be kicking themselves.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please help us grow by…

See you next week!

Mai An Tran, co-founder of MixBloom