Over at W2Forum Martina (the AdverBlogs one) posted the story (membership required) about The Shame Academy, Sony Ericsson’s new promotion.
Sony Ericsson is promoting its K300i with the “snap, send and shame” idea, an invitation to students to send embarrassing photos of themselves and their friends taken on their phones. Young mobile users will then be able to vote the best, or worst, pictures depending on the point of view, and win a K300i phone.
To which there was a response about how irresponsible this is, that it would encourage Happy Slapping etc.
Sorry, but I don’t think this is right. It’s implying that a camera phone promotion can make kids turn into violent criminals. The point is that there’s always been kids beating up people for fun/swag (we used to call it mugging). The difference is that they’re filming it now.
As far as the promotion is concerned, I think it’s great and a very good use of MMS as a tool. Funny, topical, targeted, irreverent, (who cares if grown ups get offended?) this is exactly how kids use MMS – assuming they can get MMS to work on their phones 
How should SE promote camera phones – by getting people to send in formal, posed family portrait pics?
While Happy Slapping is a problem, I don’t think people will connect it to this promotion, in the same way as I don’t associate my video camera with making snuff movies. I certainly didn’t connect the two and I spend a lot of my day talking to mainstream journo’s about Happy Slapping at the moment.
Clearly, both things involve camera phones (actually being pedantic, Happy Slapping is video phones, mostly 3G, and are mainly circulated by Bluetooth). But blaming the technology is a cop out – “society” is to blame for criminal violence like this, not the phones themselves. It’s like saying that the Internet is responsible for paedophilia – it’s mixing up cause and effect.
If Kelloggs were to run a “Win a Car” competition, would people be be worried about the fact that the car might knock someone over and slam Kelloggs as irresponsible? I don’t think so. Handset manufacturers are no more responsible for people misusing their products than brick manufacturers are for the odd case of someone being hit over the head with a brick.
I think it’s a fine marketing campaign and SE have clearly taken sensible and responsible precautions in its execution. They have a fully moderated posting process (nothing violent or blatantly sexual will get through) and a complaints process to remove pics people aren’t comfortable with.
It’s great marketing.
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