My reaction to the new MorphMonkey marketing campaign on Facebook is… well awkward. It just makes me feel a little uncomfortable. Yet that’s the point.
A press release from the American Social Health Association explains the campaign:
“In an unusual creative move, a team at Duval Guillaume (DG) has agreed to spread an infectious disease by working with the American Social Health Association (ASHA). The aim is to… highlight the dangers of Chlamydia to young people during April, which is STD Awareness Month. …(The team) devised a Facebook application called MorphMonkey in which users are invited to “make a love child” by morphing pictures of their own faces with that of their friends.
The humor then takes a different turn. The infected user is notified that they have caught the infection from their friend and is prompted to discover more on the ASHA website: www.ashastd.org. The message is “Spread it here so we can beat it here”, according to all involved with the program.”
I learned about this new application from a post on TechCrunch. I find the comments below the post interesting to get the social buzz. The campaign is quite edgy in that the MorphMonkey application page on Facebook makes no mention of Chlamydia. Essentially participants… dare I say it… get caught with their pants down.
Here’s the MorphMonkey application page on Facebook.
Filed under: Social Marketing, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Word of Mouth / Viral Marketing | Tagged: American Social Health Association, facebook, MorphMonkey, viral campaign
