How to piss off your target market

Nolafemmes, a New Orleans blog, is mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore.

In today's epically titled post "Historic French Quarter and Faubourg Tremé defaced with graffiti advertising Coca-Cola products," the blogger takes issue with Coca-Cola's egregious graffiti stencil messaging. She goes as far as to write the mayor of New Orleans to complain about it, even citing laws against this type of behavior.

The ads were designed to coincide with The NCAA Final Four. The messaging is for Coke Zero and Powerade. They were placed in high traffic areas, natch.

The Coke Zero message, though not very legible on the blog, looks like it has some tie-in to some offer or something, if one texts the word "Hoops" to a number, something happens.

Powerade, on the other hand, says "Hydrate Your Home Team."

https://nolafemmes.com/2012/03/30/graffitidefaced/

It doesn't take much effort to realize why the woman would be upset. But I'll just go ahead and add more reasons to the list. Like: the lines suck. There is no idea here. And the advertising is a complete wank fest.

If law-breaking is involved don't you think it would be worth the effort to, oh, I don't know, do something creative and smart and even conceptually relevant to the media "buy?"

The best is the "New York Ad Agency" in question even fully admits breaking the law in their ad seeking a graffiti artist on Craig's List. I mean, really? You post an ad seeking an artist there?

While they thought they were being smart by taking the ad down, thanks to the magic of the internet, someone took a screen capture.

And as if doing crap advertising wasn't bad enough, the agency offered 15 bucks per stencil. 600 bucks for doing 40 of them. Way to exploit the artist.

But hey: At least they've got some earned media, thanks to Nolafemmes, adland and twitter.

Update: According to comments section below, they are working to remove the stencils. Awesome.

Previous street chalk ad ideas in adland.
City fights back - Pavement Not Ad Space
Verizon fined for chalk ads on sidewalk
Drive agency graffiti on ped X
Sony graffiti ads