An invention: paper over a mistake with more mistakes / La Redoute "THE NAKED MAN"

The problem

In a photo of children running on a beach, a naked man could be seen coming up out of the water in the background. It had been live for several hours before anyone noticed. The site's zoom feature let people see the details all too clearly, which only fueled the fire. France has a reputation for being relaxed about nudity, but plenty of people said nudity on a kids' page was "clearly inappropriate." Some people in the industry even wondered if it was a deliberate stunt, a bit like Benetton's shock marketing. For the brand, it was about as bad a situation as you could imagine.

The insight

CD Benjamin Marchal later said that ideas increasingly come from something negative — and a bad buzz moment is a perfect example of that. If you apologize and rush to put out the fire, all you do is confirm: yes, this really was a failure. Instead, after apologizing, La Redoute deliberately hid more odd images across its entire site — like a crocodile in a swimming pool — and turned finding them into a game, using humor to get people laughing along with them instead of at them. Rather than erasing the mistake, they made more mistakes on purpose and turned the whole thing into a joke. That reversal was the key idea.

The idea

CLM BBDO proposed hiding crocodiles and other strange images across La Redoute's entire site and turning the hunt for them into a game. They rolled it out on social media as a game with rewards, turning users into "detectives." By joking about their own failure and acting self-deprecating, the brand shifted the whole mood around the controversy from anger to laughter. Users even found another genuine mistake on their own — a misspelled "Enjoy Holydays" on a t-shirt — which only added to the fun of the hunt.

What happened

A few months later, this crisis response won a Gold Lion at Cannes. In the PR Lions judging, it moved from the shortlist to a medal and finally all the way to Gold. One juror admitted feeling baffled even while praising it, saying something like: with the world practically falling apart, this story about a naked man sneaking into a catalog shoot kept coming up on the list again and again — was it that the agency couldn't Photoshop him out, or was it planned all along? The campaign also won a Bronze at the Clio Awards 2013.

Afterthought

It really takes guts to respond to a mistake by making more mistakes. The normal instinct is to hide it, pretend it never happened, apologize and move on. But CLM BBDO and La Redoute chose the opposite path, betting everything on turning the failure into a feature. Benjamin Marchal's philosophy feels like it's all wrapped up in this one case: when everyone says go right, go left. Take the risk. As the world gets flatter and flatter, creativity needs spontaneity at its core. This is the kind of emergency that really tests what advertising is made of.

Awards

• Cannes Lions Gold 2012

Tags