Earl Nightingale said that “Creativity is a natural extension of our enthusiasm.” It’s a crying shame then that digi-agency Poke has gotten punished for their invention and innovation. If you recall, the agency recently launched Snckrz! – a site that allowed users to create their own Snickers’ logo and also tracked users on Twitter. The site, which according to the agency cost almost nothing to create, has had over 80,000 users with an average visit time of 5-8 minutes. To top it off, the site lead many people to go to the actual Snickers. Agencies beg, borrow and steal for that sort of engagement.
Well, it’s over kids. Tom Ajello, the creative director at Poke, has begun tweeting that the site has been forced off of the web. Why? Snickers and their parent company, Mars, have sent a cease and desist. On one hand you get it, right? Snickers didn’t authorize Poke to do anything with/for their brand at all. In fact, the brand recently dropped way too much on a complicated website of their own.
However, um… Snickers? Why bite all of the consumers who have enjoyed interacting with your brand? They love you and now, they will hate you. Also, Ajello worked on the award winning design for Snickers.com way back in 2001 for Modem Media. So when he and his two partners Aaron Rutledge and Michael Kantrow, were in a cab dreaming up the site, they loved you, too.
It’s the same old story – brand shirk the love of consumers in favor of control. Okay. Well, Snickers… if you wanted control, why not just co-opt Snckrz! and make it part of what Nick Parish from Creativity called the “pretty-but-obtuse” legitimate site?
Let’s face it – Mars, the parent company of Snickers, has been struggling to understand the web. Consider the Skittles Twitter homepage from Agency.com. There, Mars decided it didn’t need any control. For the real Snickers site, they took the opposite tact of too much control. There’s a fine line in there and it seems that Poke found it.
A quick search of Twitter will turn up numerous tweets from people who loved Snckrz! Snickers better hope there isn’t some backlash in this decision to get the lawyers involved. Oh! I spoke too soon. Already, Twitters are having a reaction with responses like the image below or the newly created Snickers fail tag (#Snickersfail). Seriously. Snickers, I thought you were smarter than this?
If you want to get your logo, you best do it in the next six hours. According the cease and desist, the whole thing is donezo at 6 pm. The logo above, which reads “shame on you”? What happens to it when the site shuts down? Can’t wait to find out… :sniff, sniff: