Named by the internet

The internet is like the ocean: vast, beautiful, and full of terrifying creatures that want to eat you alive.

Mtn Dew learned this the hard way last month when it launched “Dub The Dew,” a campaign letting people vote for the name of its new apple-flavored soda. Expecting something short and sweet, the company was instead hit with top vote-getters like “Diabeetus,” “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong,” “Moist Nugget” and, my personal favorite, “Soda.”

It was a feeding frenzy. Turns out the sharks at 4chan (or Reddit, depending on who you ask) raided the competition and flooded it with votes for some of the more unsavory names. Mtn. Dew was forced to take down the website, cancel the campaign and concede on Twitter that it had “lost to the internet.”

Crowdsourcing is, at first glance, a very appealing idea — bring people to your site, have them come up with names and then bask in the sunlight of your heightened brand awareness. You might even get a serviceable name out of it.

But there’s one thing companies often forget in this fantasy: this is the internet, where people don’t give a shit about anything. Here, being offensive has an entertainment value exponentially greater than being genuine. And if people can take anonymous jabs at a transparent marketing gimmick from a major corporation, that just makes life a little more interesting.

Obviously not every naming contest is going to be hijacked by jesters. It can be a great way to get communities involved if you’re naming something in the public domain, like an asteroid or a baby penguin. But using the internet to name your product (or even worse, your company) is a supremely lazy creative endeavor that’s likely to come back to bite you.

Imagine you’re naming a baby and you ask the people in your neighborhood for suggestions. Here’s your pool of creative talent: that creepy guy who takes the garbage out in his underwear, the bachelor pad with the lawn full of beer cans and ping pong balls, and the crazy elderly woman who tries to serve tea to the squirrels. Now multiply this neighborhood by a million, and let them name your baby. “Moist Nugget” doesn’t sound so bad now, does it.

Crowdsourcing isn’t an evil idea. It aims to pull talent from quantity over quality, with the hope that any cream will rise to the top. But when you’re a multi-billion dollar corporation asking people to work for free on something they don’t care about, that cream is most likely sour.

Update: Mtn. Dew tells us the Dub The Dew campaign was developed by a “customer” and was not an official Dew program. However it’s still unclear if Mtn. Dew was aware of it and who, if anyone, approved of the entire thing.

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