February 6, 2015

Coke draws the line at making Mein Kampf happy

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CokeTweetCoca-Cola’s entry into the Super Bowl ad wars, #MakeItHappy, may have been a display of “courage and optimism,” if you believe The Verge, but mostly it was an invtiation to get trolled. And get trolled they did.

For the campaign, which was called “Make it Happy” and introduced in an ad spot during the Super Bowl, Coke invited people to reply to negative tweets with the hashtag “#MakeItHappy”.

The idea was that an automatic algorithm would then convert the tweets, using an encoding system called ASCII, into pictures of happy things – such as an adorable mouse, a palm tree wearing sunglasses or a chicken drumstick wearing a cowboy hat.

Gawker’s Caity Weaver tweeted “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children,” and asked Coke to #makeithappy. So they did!

Weaverhappytweet

Gawker Editor in Chief Max Read explains what happened next.

Gawker Editorial Labs director Adam Pash built us a bot to tweet the book line-by-line, and then tweet at Coke to #SignalBoost Hitler and #MakeItHappy. Below, read Mein Kampf, as told by the global soft-drink manufacturing and distribution corporation Coca-Cola.

If you want to read the 297 Mein Kampf tweets that Gawker’s @MeinCoke sent, you can do that here.  If you want to see Mein Kampf  “on Coke,” you can also see some of that here.  But don’t bother sending your own tweets; Coke has suspended the campaign, calling Gawker’s bot “a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign.” The giant, tooth-decaying, obesity-causing conglomerate just wanted to make the world a little better, and you mean people ruined it. Sigh.

For what it’s worth, this is not the first time that Coke has found itself trolled by Hitler.

Julia Fleischaker is the director of marketing and publicity at Melville House.

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