Has anybody seen this?
==-- "Spank My Monkey" Marketing Scandal Exposed by Hotrodders.com --== The "Spank My Monkey" scandal began when the forums of the Hotrodders Bulletin Board were spammed with a lewd guerrilla marketing promotion. The promotional material included a photograph of men leaning on a hot rod wearing thongs imprinted with the slogan "Spank My Monkey", and a video featuring close-ups of urinating in the street, drinking and driving, and a scene in which a shop owner declared that he was "The Anti-Christ of the Hot Rod World". We discovered that the "Spank My Monkey" marketing promotion was tied to several prominent names in the hotrodding industry. The promotional video encouraged people to attend a car giveaway at the upcoming SEMA Show, the huge annual industry show put on by SEMA, the Specialty Equipment Market Association. In addition, the material had been posted by a marketer working in connection with Overhaulin', a popular hot rod-themed television show on The Learning Channel. To handle the situation, SEMA's recent Chairman of the Board, Corky Coker, registered a username on the Hotrodders Bulletin Board. The promotional video had mentioned Coker's company, Coker Tire, and had featured his brother and his wheel company, Newstalgia Wheel. After Coker failed to convince the forum members of his innocence, he got caught in a scheme to use a fake username to make veiled threats to the forum administrator. Following Coker's public relations fiasco, the SEMA car giveaway which had been promoted in the video ended up never occurring, and the episodes of Overhaulin' on The Learning Channel which were scheduled to feature the Spank My Monkey participants were quietly pulled from the air. Lacking a genuine apology from Coker, SEMA, or The Learning Channel, we documented and parodied the failed Spank My Monkey marketing campaign on a new website, SpankMyMarketer.com. SpankMyMarketer.com aims to "reverse" the Spank My Monkey promotion by teaching people what goes on behind the scenes in guerrilla marketing campaigns, and enabling them to make their own "anti-advertisements" of the original Spank My Monkey promotional material. http://SpankMyMarketer.com When Discovery Communications (the parent company of The Learning Channel, Discovery Channel, and many other television channels) found out about SpankMyMarketer.com, they tried to silence our criticism. A lawyer for Discovery attempted to use baseless legal claims to demand the takedown of an embarrassing photograph of Discovery's executives on SpankMyMarketer.com. We refused to comply, citing our right to free speech in exposing and parodying the Spank My Monkey promotion. When Discovery wouldn't back down, the net's leading free speech organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the "EFF") came to our assistance with free legal representation. It's fascinating to witness the financial goals of certain elements of the hotrodding industry intersect with the cultural values of online hotrodding communities. Men in thongs, "spank my monkey" slogans, hot rod Anti-Christs, secret threats from top industry executives, and shows pulled from television. Our members know that we exist to freely share hotrodding knowledge and culture. We're not fodder for the industry's guerrilla marketing campaigns, and we certainly don't back down when multi-billion dollar corporations try to threaten our right to speak freely. For the full details on the Spank My Monkey marketing scandal, visit SpankMyMarketer.com: http://SpankMyMarketer.com Or, follow the story in the press: Discovery Upset About Parody Spanking http://www.securitypronews.com/2007/0216.html EFF Backs SpankMaker http://www.p2pnet.net/story/11350 Discovery Communications Tries to Chill Speech with Baseless Legal Claims http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_02.php#005126
