This past summer, Walmart had a rather unique contest to promote these new Energy Sheets, which I'm assuming are like Red Bull in Listerine strip form. They announced that they would send Pitbull, a popular rapper of questionable quality, to whichever Walmart location received the most "likes" on Facebook. This seemed simple enough: corporate marketing through social networking. Nothing new.
What could possibly go wrong?
And then along came David Thorpe and John Hendren, of "Something Awful" fame. These two aren't exactly Pitbull fans, and wanted Pitbull to get as far away from them as possible. So they encouraged people to like the most remote Walmart location: #2711 on Kodiak Island, near Alaska.
The store's Facebook page ended up getting more than 60,000 likes. (A quick Google search shows the population is only around 6,000.) #ExilePitbull became a trending topic on Twitter. And the island town ended up winning by a landslide.
There was some doubt about whether or not Pitbull would actually go to Kodiak, but out of a sense of good humor (or maybe just his contract) he ended up going to Kodiak after all.
So is this an example of culture jamming? I think it could be. The people behind #ExilePitbull used the corporation's contest and turned it against itself, thereby sabotaging the point of the contest. It's along the same lines as the the "Dub the Dew" campaign, which ended up spiraling out of control because people on the internet kept coming up with offensive and ridiculous names for Mountain Dew.
You never know what could happen if you get the internet involved in a campaign.
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