How Kotaku and Gawker Media Lost a Reader

It's been a long time since my last blog and I've mostly moved away from this site for a variety of reasons, but I feel a need to express myself in an appropriate venue today. I just recently read about Gawker's publicity stunt where they tweeted Hitler's Mein Kampf and tricked Coca-Cola into re-tweeting it through the use of the MakeItHappy hashtag. To no one's surprise, said campaign has been suspended. Now, in general, I don't care for most of the opinion pieces on the Gawker Media sites because they push political correctness to a ridiculous extreme. However, in their defense, they are quite consistent with their message and overall tone which usually suggests that most of us are horrible people who need to improve (which is at least a partially true statement).

So I find it quite disturbing and disheartening that a website which presents itself as a moral authority, went out of its way to derail a completely harmless (hell, potentially beneficial) campaign about minimizing hate speech. Of course the campaign is designed to improve the image of a multinational corporation and win customer loyalty, but that is how advertising works. You can't really blame Coke for having a marketing department and this has to be one of the least sleazy ways to push a product I've ever seen. You can criticize Coke all you want for it's accused sins such as environmental destruction and exploitation of local labor, but is tweeting Mein Kampf really the most effective way to go about doing that? It's certainly not the most mature.

When you really think about all of this, Coca-Cola's MakeItHappy initiative actually worked just fine; it turned Mein Kampf into a bunch of silly pictures. So what was accomplished here besides ruining the hard work of a few people in the marketing department? Honestly, there's not much more that I need to say because Gawker is so clearly in the wrong here. It's hard to go to battle with a huge, profit-driven corporation and come out looking like the bad guy, but Gawker managed to do so. They have issued no apology despite reader backlash and they appear to be quite pleased with themselves.

I would encourage you to truly think about this incident and decide if supporting Gawker is worth your time. It is not worth mine.

I decided a long time ago they weren't worth supporting. This just backs it up. It's really hard to feel bad for Coca-Cola, but the campaign really was harmless and Gawker did a pretty shitty thing.

I honestly don't even understand this because I'm an old man (at, uh.... 29).

This seems stupid.

Well that is both very funny and really fucked up. If the person behind that was a comedian I would say that those are some rough chuckles, but good work I suppose. Now a borderline news site, that's another story entirely. I thought that ad campaign was one of the more positive I've seen in a while and for a site that claims to be credible to hijack it in this way, that's messed up. I mean they couldn't have used Ozymandias's lines from Watchmen or something? There are so many lines they could have used to make the same joke without being crass. Instead they chose crass.

t's hard to go to battle with a huge, profit-driven corporation and come out looking like the bad guy, but Gawker managed to do so.

That line was pretty great, and it's so true. I mean, I have no real interest in this, but from what I'm hearing in passing, it really does seem like they're in the wrong here, especially when the advertising campaign that Coca Cola was running was a way to lighten harassment on the internet, which is really rampant nowadays.

You've really got to be humor-deficient to be outraged about this. Coca-Cola is a giant, faceless, amoral corporation and their marketing campaigns are all about creating these bullshit, feel-good, Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul, kumbaya myths revolving around the sale and consumption of fizzy sugar water. There's not an ounce of soul or sincerity in any of that crap and this was a funny-- if a little easy-- way to point this fact out with satire.

The idea that you were a Gawker reader and this was too crass for your delicate sensibilities is unbelievable to me. It was this and their longstanding commitment to "political correctness," right? What a crock.

So their click bait antic result in more click bait antics....I don't know they seem to be working as intended. Just move along and your will be so much happier, thankfully I do not get suckered into it all as other people seem to be linking them less.

@chrissedoff: Yeah, how dare coke try to have an uplifting marketing message, and in an ad campaign that sells their product to boot!

Coke: Lets make the internet a little less hate filled and sell some product at the same time!

Gawker: Screw that, were going from 0-Hitler in record time! Take hate filled tweets and turn them into happy ASCII art? Not on our watch, the hate must flow!

Yeah.. coke is a real bunch of jerks in this scenario. Of course it isn't like Gawker is itself a faceless amoral company who uses clickbait articles and incendiary tactics to drive their business or anything...

Been seeing a lot of posts here mentioning Kotaku ever since Patrick transitioned over there. I have no idea if Game Informer has an online community but, If they do, I really hope there's a renaissance flourishing on their forums talking about how ridiculous Giant Bomb is and shame on Dan for moving to a website that discusses professional wrestling more than video games.

Dude do just the tiniest bit of reading about Coca Cola and you'll see they're not a company that needs or deserves your valiant attempts at protecting their stupid message that would do nothing to help anyone.

Their water usage in third world countries, aggressive campaigns to rid rural Asian regions of locally made drinks in favour of their own, proliferation of high fructose corn syrup and the use of GM crops, deadly pesticides used by their farmers (again often in very poor countries). I mean you're looking at this like Coke said "help let's help people" when really it's more "Internet bullying is a thing, let's ride that wave and show we hate it too or something".

Gawker has it's issues and Kotaku is barely worth reading, I agree with that. It's mostly garbage. But I mean clickbait stories are just fun stupid junk, they aren't literally polluting the water supplies of third world countries like Coca Cola are. I'd say let Gawker make fun of the big corporations (even though they are one themselves).

Also, I know using John Oliver/Jon Stewart/Colbert videos to prove a point has been done to death, but this one is very relevant.

That really shouldn't have made me laugh as much as it did.

Wait, Gawker was trying to garner publicity in the most moronic way possible? Stop the presses.

At least I got a slight chuckle out of this one.

I'm not sure I entirely understand what this is about. Did they have some deeper (presumably completely misguided) purpose behind this? Or is it just purely moronic Internet trolling?

I don't know which one would be worse honestly. But the latter basically just makes them 4chan, so I want no part of that.

i don't know man, it was pretty funny.

@thatpinguino said:

Sorry, I thought we were talking about Gawker? Judging by my RSS reader every day, they fall squarely in the "empty calories" category.

Actually, now that I think about it, that's a lot like Coke!

@shellsoft: If said community does exist, I would imagine they instead would be saying 'good for Dan, he finally found a website where he can talk about wrestling instead of video games'

Not buying it, dude. The beauty of marketing moving to social media is that it puts greedy conglomerates on a level footing with their critics. Why let Coca-Cola fool you into helping them maintain that genteel public image that masks the rapacious business practices that @pandabear described?

They probably did it so they could liken Coca Cola to Hitler and make a bunch of shitty clickbait articles. They pull shit like this all the time.

Edit: For the record, I hate Coca Cola too so this whole situation is kind of a "whatever" for me.

Didn't hear about this, but that's actually pretty funny. I still don't give credence or page views to any Gawker site for much better reasons, but a pretty clever way to harmlessly fuck with a goofy corporate twitter bot isn't one of them.

Poor, poor Coca-Cola. I doubt they'll ever recover from this. Damn you, Gawker. Damn you.

Coca-Cola: Empty calories for your body.

Gawker: Empty calories for your mind.

Although it is all "Gawker Media" I separate the antics of the Gawker site itself from Kotaku. I wouldn't dump Giant Bomb if CBS did something questionable.

Though Gawker Gawker does seem to do awful things quite often. Seriously, I don't know what goes through those guys' minds sometimes. It's strange to see people like Patrick, who clearly care about their work and the message they send, and these jerks who seem to like to cause trouble.

Encouragement toward good is still encouragement toward good even if it's from a "greedy conglomerate." Yes, there are controlling parties in the Coca-Cola Corporation that pursue unethical practices within their fields of management, but believe it or not, a lot of Coke employees are no different than you or me. Our nature and conscience constantly collide, and if someone else in the same boat proposes conscience over nature, even if their motivation is ultimately based in nature (greed), then it's a positive force in the recipients. If someone gives you nails hoping you'll buy a hammer, don't just throw them away--find a constructive use for them.

There are family members I will never meet because of that book, and I still think you're blowing smoke over nothing.

If anything is morally reprehensible in this, it's that either company thinks that they have the moral high ground in this situation. And even that's a reach, because I don't for a moment think that anyone involved made a single action based on sincerity, good faith or belief in the common good.

Ultimately Coca-Cola gives me calorie-free sin syrup and Gawker gives me free comedic relief via the Boogeyman Effect, so I don't see any reason why either should stop existing. Unless we're arguing for a radical deconstruction of the capitalist system, then I'm back on board.

The whole thing is dumb. Not outrageous dumb, just dumb.

Like a lot of things on this site.

When two kinds of scum clash. I just point and laugh at them.

I think what's so offensive here is Gawker's supposed to be a journalism outlet, but they lowered themselves to the level of common internet trolls here--not that they're often above that level anyway. They had no higher journalistic purpose here; they didn't send a message, aside from: "Gawker is composed of immature douchebags," whether or not that's true. Of course Coke wasn't being altruistic with this campaign, but it's far less harmful than the typical ad bullshit. This could've been used for actual journalism, though. Instead of using a highly offensive book that deserves as little coverage as possible, they could've tricked Coke into tweeting facts about bad shit Coke has done. But I guess Gawker would rather provide people with a few moments of empty humor than inform the uninformed (i.e. People who would fucking follow Coke on Twitter).

Personally, I'm not really offended, because this is the shit I expect from Gawker. Kotaku is too good to be a part of that conglomerate--and I don't even like Kotaku that much.

P.S. What a goddamn stupid ad campaign, anyway. Coke should've expected this from the get-go.

Gawker are fucking idiots. Always have been.

They're the same people who pretended they didn't know buying stolen goods was illegal when they bought that iPhone that was lost in SF.

They have no scruples, never have. I quit all their sites a while back. I do miss Jalopnik, but that's it.

Gawker also uses twitter spambot services for spamming hashtags so much that twitter's anti-spam removes the tag from trending, if they find something they don't like.

Gawker has always been a crap collection of sites.

I'm not sure I understand what the big deal is. Their campaign was intending to turn negative and hateful tweets into cute ASCII art. And they turned Mein Kampf (a negative and hateful, although very historically important book) into cute ASCII art. They did exactly what they set out to do.

Compared to some of the hateful stuff that gets spouted on twitter every day (death threats, extreme racism, other extreme prejudices, very sexual content etc) the specific parts of Mein Kampf they turned into ASCII art was incredibly tame.

Anyone could have seen that this marketing campaign was a bad idea. Anything that automatically retweets people can and will be abused. It was only a matter of time, it's probably a good thing Gawker brought this to their attention in a relatively inoffensive way before someone like 4chan decided to do it in a much bigger way.

It wasn't really funny, and I have never cared for much anything Gawker has ever done, yet it wasn't that offensive but certainly not tasteful. That being said, for the reasons listed above, Coke is far from a "good guy" in kind of any respect ever (as is any company in that strata) even if I do enjoy a good Coke Life or Vanilla Coke from time to time.

So it's a for-profit website on the internet?

There's no monetized site that actually gives a shit about the individual readers/users. We're just numbers that only matter in bulk.

We tried to code a bot that would take Gawker articles and turn them into journalism but it's beyond mankinds current technological ability - @Totalbiscuit

https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit/status/563458877170008065

Id rather take a bath with my father than contribute to ad-clicks on that website.

Yeah, the most confusing part of this post for me was that you seem to think you'd have to convince people here that Gawker is generally garbage.

This is actually the funniest thing any gawker media site has ever done and I really don't understand the mentality behind getting outraged by a corporate feel good campaign (tm) being disrupted.

That Cookie guy is click-bait/internet drama in human form. He's the Sean Hannity of video games.

@mbr2: I don't think that is a fair statement. From listening to his videos, it seems to be against censorship, people being accountable etc. It doesn't feel like when he talks he is spinning stuff. He isn't trying to play on emotions. Unfortunately I don't have the time to articulate it right now, but calling him far left/right isn't fair

Gawker media is run by a dude that have gone on record as saying he wants his sites too run MORE like a tabloid magazine. How anyone still try to give them any type of credibility is beyond me and you know this is not the first nor the worst thing they have done collectively. Patrick moving over to kotaku is kind of a slap to the face for me as someone who thought him a pretty impressive voice in the industry and even patrick's articles over there have been getting the typical kotaku click-bait headlines.

IMO while they cause nowhere near the level of destructiveness to their industry as coke have to the soda industry. Gawker media is still a disease to the tech/gaming/geek culture/industry. Stop giving them money.

Deadspin was an alright website at one point. But yeah, nothing gawker owns has been any good for a long time.

This seems par for the course to me, surprised that this specific thing was the one that crossed the line for you.

[redacted] = banned site

Gawker media literally spouting nazi hate speech = defense force engage.

i have to say, i think this is pretty fantastic.

the coke campaign is tone-deaf and disingenuous, as is 95% of the twittersphere (in addition to being vacuous as fuck). please forgive me for not shedding a tear when a giant mega-corporation is (to quote the late summerjam scholar) "brutally rebuffed" in the most internet-ass way possible- godwin's law.

and color be deeply shocked- someone on this website is complaining about gawker. i have zero love for any media institution- but this is getting to be the equivalent of hanging out on huffpo all day just to complain about fox news.

@dudeglove: Don't forget that they refused to take down the Hulk Hogan sex tape, published a Jezebel article bragging about beating up boyfriends, and produced a minimum of three Max-Temkin-is-a-terrible-person-because-of-something-someone-said-on-the-internet type articles.

Don't think that stops them from moralizing at other people though, which is ok for them to do because....um....oh jeeze. Leaking that Tarentino script was pretty cool, right? Not as cool as Disney prince junk galleries or...actually you know what? This one kind of stands on it's own.

I always do a double take when people talk about reading gawker sites.

Edit: So I plumbed the depths of the comments because I have nothing to do for the next 45 minutes. It's pretty amazing, in the way that watching Syrian T-62s operate unsupported and soak up ATGMs is amazing.

"Those of you whining because Gawker hurt Coke's feelings need to get over yourselves. It was a stupid marketing stunt and Coke got what it deserves. If Coke truly wanted to try turning hate into something beautiful, it should come up off some of those billions in cash and do stuff to help those in need. Turning hate phrases into ASCII art is useless, dumb and does nothing to truly address combating hate."

"This was really not one-tenth as clever as you seem to think it was. And you did prove Coke's point about people using the internet to just pointlessly be nasty. If there was a point to this besides proving that Gawker is always ready to sink to a new low, I can't imagine what it was.And let's be honest: If Vice did this, you'd have already written the 5,000 word takedown about how awful it was. Who the fuck on the staff thought this was a good idea?"

"so YOU provide the hate speak, then someone's rando computer bot thing rearranges it into "happy", and the rando computer bot thing is the hateful piece of shit? uh, ok..."

"Gawker..as a german and a person whose grandparents had to live in a KZ for 3 years of their childhood because my great-grandparents were open anti-nazi... that is incredible offensive. you shitheads spread the word of a monster just to prove your point. Shit how can you do something like that. really.. Oh well, what do I expect. As far as I know this community, a lot of comments will now tell me that I overreact and that gawker are the good ones here..I mean they just spread the word of one mass murderer and had fun doing it."

This last one is in response to the German person being offended.

"The point of the Coke twitter is to take something and make fun of it and trivialise it to the point where it is turned quite literally turn it into a childish cartoon. The polarity of this and the overwhelming negativity and awfulness of Mein Kamf is (presumably) why it was chosen, not to further some (imagined) promotion of Adolf Hitler. While you and everyone has the right to be offended by the content, I can only say that personally I didn't consider the content as much as the effect, it could have been the bible or the Quran or the little red book manifesto and it'd have been no better or no worse."

This is the gawker comment equivalent of when the burning ammunition produces flames so hot and big that they shoot out the top hatches and gun barrel as it starts to sag from the intense heat.

So ummm.... yeah I wonder what Scoops is thinking now about his parent organization.