The Stratius Blog

Somebody at AMC really screwed up.

Let’s say that you are a cable network with a hot show heading into season 2, your best show yet in fact, so successful some fans are impersonating the characters online and writing new dialogue for them (aka Fan Fiction)… What do you do? Easy, if your AMC, you make sure they know how little you appreciate hard core fans and threaten legal action in order to get them to stop.

I love the show Mad Med. Its a great throw back to a pretty sexy, although archaic, romanticized American history. And I am not alone. Some fans dig the show so much they embraced the characters by role playing them on the popular micro-blogging service Twitter [To catch up those unaware, Twitter is a somewhere between blogging and instant messaging, you send little 140 (cell phone text max) or less message to your network of contact].

Twitter folk are on this service all day, especially the die-hards. A lot of natural discussions happen in real time on this site, so naturally people discuss what they are passionate about, promote products, brands, websites, news, etc. This group of people came together organically and chose to have a little fun and play with their favorite tv characters.

Nine psuedo-characters from the show eventually began tweeting, writing in the voices of their counterparts on the show. Its great fun and pretty entertaining, especially when you consider the only people reading what they are writing are other fans of the show that choose to “follow” their tweets. Here is a sampling of tweets from one of the most populr characters, Peggy Olson:

@joan_holloway has it all wrong. I know the other office girls aren’t jealous. They wouldn’t want this job. But I’m not like the other girls (peggyolson)

I’m not sure I’m following these kids with their “young ideas” but Duck says we need them to get new accounts. So here’s to young ideas… (Roger_Sterling)

Bottom line is someone saw infringement here on AMC’s product and brand, Mad Men. Maybe a writer, probably on overzealous, soon to be fired legal type. But if AMC has anyone with some sense that works for them they would have and should have encouraged this. They had something being done for free, that you can’t buy, ravenous fans, evangelists even, of their product promoting it in a fun way to their peers. Was the brand being harmed? Not at all.

Last month I wrote about Online Brand Mascots, using Meghan McCain as an example, and how they can do wonders for a brand by augmenting it in ways that it is unable to accomplish otherwise. These Twitter characters, fan driven or otherwise, were perfect Brand Mascots for the TV show Mad Men. They took the show’s personalities and inserted them online into the daily lives of fans. Allowing fans to connect and be reminded of the show in a subtle an fun way.

My advice to AMC and every other corporatin that thinks they can control their brand online 100%? Get real, its never gonna happen. Emrace the online wild west and position yourself to take advantage of these situations rather than stifling them. I doubt in the long run AMC will get hurt from this too badly, but what they wont know is where this opporunity could have taken them if they had embraced it. Its not too late though. American consumers are forgiving and have a short memory. If AMC does things right, and takes a lesson from Coke and their similar Mentos Viral Video mistake and ultimate embrace of the viral videos, they can make up ground on the faith they have lost in some of their most stalwort online fans. They should not only encourage these Twitter users but should promote their activities, create a community for others to do the same, build a fan fiction online presence based on their show and the fictional ad firm and characters. There are a ton of options, but the longer it takes them to pull their head out of their ass the more potential publicity they waste.

Update: Turns out that the very premise AMC was making about infringement had no legal legs to stand on; explained here in a very good post by TV Barn.

Update: Here is a fuller list of the grwoing “ad icons” as well as “Mad Men Characters”. While this little community expands, you can keep track of it pretty well through a couple of the Twitter profiles, specifially the profile of David Ogilvy (Ogilvy, for the unaware, is one of the top, if not the top, US advertising firms). Here are their avatars and links to their Twitter profiles. Or check out David Ogilvy’s page and who he is “following” for a more up to date break down (double listed names are the replacement profiles for when Twitter temporarily took the originals offline).

joanholloway | don_draper | joan_holloway

peggyolson | pete_campbell | bertram_coope

Roger_Sterling | Bobbie_Barret | paul_kinsey

Sal_Romano | Bud_Melman | betty_draper

harry_cran | helen_bishop | francine_hanson

midge_daniel | trudy_campbell | dick_whitman

duckphillip | Jimmy_Barrett | Billbernbach

Raymond_Loewy | benjamin_spock | David Ogilvy

Culprits?