Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - Hug the Cactus: Advertising to Haters

Episode Date: February 15, 2025

This week, we look at how some companies advertise to haters.Every advertiser gets negative comments on social media. Some brands shrink away – and some take those negative comments and spin them into marketing gold.Supercuts took negative comments about cheap haircuts and created a hilarious advertising campaign.Spirit Airlines gave haters a place to vent – then offered them 8,000 free air miles.And drink maker Oatly, actually dedicated a website to their haters. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. You may know me as the host of Under the Influence, but my passion is The Beatles. And I'm hosting a new podcast series called The Beetleology Interviews. I get to talk to people who worked with The Beatles and love The Beatles and people who write about The Beatles. And their stories are surprising and so very interesting. The Beetleology Interviews. Give it a listen today.

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This is an Apostrophe podcast production. We're going to show you our big news, Judy Baker. Start the car! Mamma Mia, that's a spicy meatball! What love doesn't conquer, Alka-Seltzer will. What a relief! You're under the influence of Thier Terry O'Reilly. Recording artists have a love-hate relationship with critics. They love critics when their reviews are glowing and hate them when the critics hate the music.

It's interesting to see how time changes those opinions. Take the Rolling Stones album Exile on Main Street. When the Stones released that album in 1972, many critics hated it. Some yawned, and a Rolling Stone magazine writer said it simply missed the mark. When it was reassessed many years later, many people thought it was probably the best album of the Stones' career. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame put it at number 6 on the definitive 200 list of albums that every music lover should own. And Rolling Stone magazine ranked it number 14 on the greatest albums of all time list.

When Neil Young released Harvest in 1972, the Montreal Gazette said it had embarrassing moments. Rolling Stone magazine said it was a rip-off of Young's previous album and said the lyrics were glib. Harvest went on to be the bestselling album of 1972. It was the number one album on Billboard for two weeks. And 30 years after its initial harsh assessment, Rolling Stone now ranks at number 72

on its 500 greatest albums of all time list. ["Blood on the Tracks"] When Bob Dylan released Blood on the Tracks in 1975, a Rolling Stone reviewer said it was made with typical shoddiness. Another critic said the songs were so trashy they sound like mere practice takes, and another said the instrumentation was incompetent. Well, time heals all heals. When the album was re-reviewed years later, it landed at number nine

on Rolling Stone's Greatest Albums of All Time list. It's in the Grammy Hall of Fame. It's a double platinum certified top seller and is considered one of Dylan's best albums. one of Dylan's best albums. ["What's the Story?" by Oasis plays.] When Oasis released What's the Story? Morning Glory in 1995, critics came down hard.

Melody makers said it was labored and lazy. Another publication called it tiresomely generic, adding that the lyrics were nothing much about anything. Rolling Stone magazine actually took the opposite view and gave it a great rating. Over time, What's the Story, Morning Glory sold so many albums that it's 14 times

platinum certification in the UK wasn't broken until Adele's 21 album 16 years later. When the Beatles released their masterpiece, Abbey Road, in 1969, many critics did not say it was all right. The New York Times said the songs were nothing special. Rolling Stone magazine hated the use of synthesizers, saying it artificializes the music. The most the London Times could say was that the best songs were minor pleasures and another publication called the album Gimmicky. Suffice it to say, many critics now say it may be the Beatles' best album.

Rolling Stone magazine put it at number five on its greatest albums of all time, the highest-ranking Beatles album on that list, according to reports it has sold close to 30 million copies worldwide, and Here Comes the Sun became the first Beatles song to be streamed over 1 billion times. Despite all the initial haters, all of these albums have become classics. The world of marketing has its fair share of haters. With the advent of social media, the hate for companies and brands has intensified. But some companies have learned to harness the hate. By using some very interesting jujitsu, they've been able to turn that hate into marketing

gold. You're under the influence. The pandemic changed so many things in our lives, and some of those changes are surprising. For example, hair salons and barbers suffered and not just because nobody was going out for haircuts during the lockdown, the problem is that people got used to wearing longer hair during lockdown and a good percentage got used to cutting their own hair. That wasn't good news for companies like Supercuts. It had 2282 locations a few years ago and is down to 1,949 now. Even though Supercuts offers a cheap haircut in a world of $75 haircuts, it still has to fight for business.

As the marketing director says, a lot of people think Supercuts is a bargain basement chop shop, and he says that just isn't so. He says there is a stark gap between the negative views of non-customers and the glowing reviews of actual customers. The company says their chain averages a 4.8 star rating on Google, but the problem is men, who make up 65% of Supercuts customers, don't tend to discuss their choice of salon with buddies. So word of mouth is low, but hater chatter is high. It seems that when people think bad haircuts, they think Supercuts. One hater posted, supercuts is cheap because

you pay with your dignity. Okay, that's funny, but supercuts has decided to lean into their haters with a brand new campaign. Rather than ignore the haters, supercuts decided to have fun with them. Because so much of the criticism is aimed at how cheap Supercuts is, the chain decided to issue a real dumb coupon. The coupon adds $50 to the price of a Supercuts haircut. Supercuts produced a video starring their marketing director and he takes on haters head to head.

When one hater said, Supercuts has got to be money laundering because who goes there? The Supercuts response was, Well, one, your mom. Two, your dad. Three, as in 23 million heads of hair we cut last year. So yeah, we laundered a lot of things, like the towels, for our hot towel refresher service. Supercuts then makes its real dumb coupon offer. The Supercuts real dumb coupon. It adds $50 to the price of any haircut.

Not $50 off, $50 on. While the reverse vanity coupon is silly, it's based on a fundamental truth that non-customers think SuperCuts is too cheap to be good. As the video says, if you feel the urge to spend more than you need to on a haircut, why not do it at SuperCuts? By being outrageous in their marketing, SuperCuts hopes the real dumb coupon will cut through and make haters smile and maybe reevaluate their opinion of the chain.

Get your supercuts realdumbcoupon at realdumbcoupon.com. Even though we have no idea why anyone would ever use it, this coupon is subject to the following terms and conditions. No cash value. Actually, it has the opposite of cash value. Offer is void. We're prohibited by law. But we doubt there's a law anywhere.

If the bearer actually wants to use this coupon, the bearer agrees to pay an additional $50 to the standard price of any haircut at supercuts. Also, bearer is a generous term to describe someone who uses this. This coupon is totally transferable and may totally be reproduced or exchanged to add unnecessary cost to your next haircut if that's what you need to do for your fragile ego. Oatly is a Swedish company that produces alternatives to dairy products made from oats. It sells its products in Sweden,

Germany, the United Kingdom, and is found in over 6,000 retail and specialty shops on this side of the pond, including thousands of Starbucks locations. Oatly's products include oat milk, ice cream, yogurt substitutes, cooking cream, and custard. The company has a knack for attracting lawsuits because of the way it markets its products. For example, the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland received a complaint from the National Dairy Council of Ireland. The problem was that Oatly described their product by saying,

quote, it's like milk, but made for humans. The Irish Dairy Council felt the line implied that cow's milk was not suitable for humans. It also said the statement inferred that oat milk was superior to cow's milk without having any supporting evidence. Oatly responded by saying that everyone knows that cow's milk was intended for calves,

but could be consumed by humans after it had undergone processing, whereas their oat drink was a completely human invention developed and intended for humans. However, the Advertising Standards Authority didn't agree, and Oatley's advertising campaign was banned in Ireland. Oatley also had trouble with the Spanish milk lobby. There was also a global boycott of Oatley when it added a new investor that Oatley customers didn't like. And when Oatley sued a smaller company for making a product called Pure Odie claiming copyright infringement, the internet railed against them calling Oatley a bully, and so on. Now, how do I know all this? Well, because Oatley has a website called f**koatley.com. When you land on the f-oatley.com website, it says

a time machine of all things bad about an oat drink company. It goes on to welcome you and explains that the site is devoted to helping their fans and the thousands of people who hate them better understand everything that's wrong with their company. Plus, Oatly said it's just super convenient to have the latest boycotts and criticisms all in one place. Which is very funny. As Oatley says on the F.Oatley site, turns out there's a lot to cover.

And as you scroll through the various lawsuits and boycotts and banned ads, you finally get to the end where it says, new scandal coming soon. Then at the very bottom of the site, it says, if you totally hate Oatley, go to ffoatley.com. On that site you can register your hate with a click. Oatley says visitors are limited to five clicks so that the hate data produced is only slightly misleading. The counter number at the time of this writing was 634,000.

And, believe it or not, at the bottom of that site is yet another option, FFFOatley.com, where another 176,000 haters recorded their burning hostility. You've got to hand it to Oatley. They hug their haters. When we come back, a city in Austria uses bad reviews to attract tourists. I co-founded a production company in Toronto many years ago. When we needed to find a new person and needed to find that person fast, there was just no way to do it quickly.

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This amazing digital picture frame lets you upload all your photos and it only takes two minutes to set up. Here's the amazing part. Your family can add photos to the frame from anywhere in the world. Our daughter in England uploads photos to our frame all the time. There's free unlimited storage and you can even upload videos with sound. Now we were so knocked out by the Aura Frame, we bought five of them. And I'm not kidding. One for each of our daughters and one for their grandparents. The Aura Frame was featured in 495 gift guides and Oprah selected it as one of her favorite

things. And right now you can save on the perfect gift that keeps on giving by visiting AuraFrames.com. For a limited time only, under the influence, listeners get $25 off their best selling Carver Mat Frame when you use the code INFLUENCE. That's AuraFrames.com, A-U-R-A-Frames.com. And don't forget to use the code use the code influence so they know we sent you. Terms and conditions apply. The City of Vienna wanted to advertise to potential tourists recently. Research revealed that 95% of potential tourists read at least seven reviews before making

a booking, 47% are skeptical if there are no negative ratings, and that 20% of all Yelp ratings are fake, which is one in five. Shocking. Vienna came to the conclusion that we are all held captive by online ratings now, that people trust the ratings of complete strangers, not even knowing if those ratings are real or genuine, or whether those strangers even have good taste.

So Vienna created a campaign called Unrating Vienna. The Vienna Tourism Board took terrible reviews from haters and used them as the basis of a campaign to convince visitors to come and judge the city for themselves. For example, one hater gave the beautiful Vienna Zoo two stars saying, I don't like zoos. The spectacular St. Stephen's Cathedral, built in the 1500s, was given a one-star review by someone. The comment? Small. A visitor to the historic 1400-room Schönebrunn Palace, known for its exquisite architecture and gardens, gave the Baroque Palace one star.

The comment? Messy lawn. And another person gave the city's top museum a two-star review, saying, too many artworks. Vienna then created an advertising campaign by taking all those hater comments and placing them over beautiful photography of each location. So the one-star rating placed over a beautiful photograph of the historic St. Stephen's Cathedral shows that the cathedral is hardly a one-star experience and made the one-star rating seem funny.

A stunning photograph of the magnificent Schönebrunn Palace was paired with its one-star review, making the review seem ludicrous. Someone gave the famous Leopold Museum there a one-star review saying, paintings are disgusting. Vienna actually projected that review onto the entire side of the beautiful museum building, which contains paintings of acknowledged Austrian masters. So the harsh review became simply laughable.

The unraiding Vienna campaign asked the question, so who decides what you like? Using humor, the campaign emphasized that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and suggested you should see the beautiful city for yourself before forming or accepting a stranger's opinion. The Vienna Tourist Board's CEO also said the campaign is intended to make people sit up, think, and trigger broader public discussion. It is a bold campaign. Shrug off the haters by turning the hate into powerful marketing. There is a ski resort in Utah called Snowbird. It's nestled in the little Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch Mountains.

Snowbird boasts Utah's longest ski season, averaging 500 inches of snow annually, and has 3,240 vertical feet of award-winning terrain. Just 45 minutes from the Salt Lake City International Airport, it's possible to fly in and ski on the same day. Like the city of Vienna, Snowbird also turned bad reviews into an advertising campaign. Instead of telling potential skiers that Snowbird offers the most challenging trails, they let their haters do the talking.

Snowbird not only featured reviews from haters in their magazine and digital marketing, they only chose the worst one star reviews. One print ad showed a dramatic photo of a skier on a steep run. The one star rating on the ad said, quote, no easy runs. We felt like our lives are in our own hands. Another ad showed an incredible photograph of one of the longest runs on the mountain.

The one star review said, too advanced. I heard Snowbird is a tough mountain, but this is ridiculous. Still another ad showed the glorious deep virgin snow on a hill. The one-star ad said, disappointed, are the people who operate the grooming equipment on strike or something? Clearly Snowbird wanted to attract skiers who were looking for a new challenge. Snowbird's marketing director said they needed to embrace the mountain's unique features like steep terrain,

long runs, and deep snow, and do it with a little humor, courtesy of haters. Hey, if you can't fix it, flaunt it. ... ... ... ...... A few years ago, Spirit Airlines decided to throw their arms around their haters. And there were a lot of them, as Spirit is one of the most complained about airlines

in the industry. Spirit is a low-cost airline, so it got you there cheaply, but it also sacrifices things like legroom and charges for carry-on luggage. So Spirit decided to give haters a place to spew their hate and get it out of their system. Hate, hate, hate, hate. Some people hate Spirit. Let's help them get it. It's a cheap seat. For a cheap ass, we call that flying smart class. While acknowledging the hate, Spirit also offered a deal.

If you have hate for Spirit or any airline, go to hate1000miles.com. You can get 8,000 free Spirit miles for letting your hate go and embracing your inner saver. With those free 8,000 frequent flyer miles, customers were just 2,000 miles short of a free trip. So the promotion encouraged people to either book another flight or sign up for a Spirit Airlines mileage account. The airline said it would continue the 8,000 miles giveaway until they had given away 1 billion miles. That's a lot of hate.

Probably the granddaddy of turning haters into marketing gold has to be Liquid Death. We've talked about the canned water brand before on our show, but Liquid Death goes where other brands fear to tread. They are famous for embracing their haters and putting a lot of effort into turning the tables on them. Case in point, Liquid Death took the most negative comments it received and created songs out of them. We've talked about volume 1 of Liquid Death's Greatest Hates,

then we said there was a volume 2, well now there is a volume 3. Taking a page from KTEL, Liquid Death even made a commercial for it. Like reading internet hate comments? Then you're going to love hearing them. Introducing Liquid Death's new Greatest Hates, volume three. 10 sassy songs with lyrics taken straight from real hate comments.

You won't be able to get out of your head. Really feel the hate which heart choppers like. Worst name for a water company. Worst name for a water company ever. And it's dumb and I won't buy it. It's dumb and I won't buy it. It's just water in a f***ing can. Featuring guest appearances by Mark McGrath, Tony Cannell, Frank Aiero, Tony Hawk, and

so many more. Bop to all the hate with this limited pressing on 12 inch vinyl. Order yours at liquiddeath.com slash greatest hates or stream it right now for free. Yep Liquid Death hugs its haters and by doing so it's now a billion dollar brand. When we come back Adidas puts the boots to haters. While all the brands we talked about today figured out a strategy to deal with haters, Adidas took a different approach. In the UK, the sneaker company created a video that featured soccer stars and gathered up

all the typical hate thrown at star athletes. As the commercial begins, the athletes look worried and concerned as hashtags like fail and shut up and cheat flash across the screen. But as the ad continues, their facial expressions start to change to confidence. fail and shut up and cheat flash across the screen. But as the ad continues, their facial expressions start to change to confidence. The video is titled, There Will Be Haters. They hate the way you walk.

They hate the way you talk. They hate the way you stand up and the way you stand out. They just wanna take you out. And they hate that they couldn't if they tried. They hate that you score all the goals and all the goals. They hate it when you win. The way you celebrate, when you lift that trophy, kiss your finger. They hate the way everyone's talking about you.

Then comes the zinger. And they hate your shiny new boots. They hate your boots because they wish they were in them. Even though social media has opened up a river of hate, Adidas figured out a way to use those prickly comments to celebrate athletes. They learned to hug the cactus. In the words of Adidas, there will be haters. Many companies shrivel in the face of haters or pretend they don't exist.

But the smarter ones figure out a way to turn those haters into effective marketing campaigns. It takes a lot of guts to spend your marketing dollars highlighting negative comments about your own company. Supercuts is cheap because you pay with your dignity. Know where I first saw that very funny but brutal line? On the Supercuts video. Oatly not only curates its own F-Oatly website, there are two other F-Oatly sites for the really big haters, and they count the clicks for all to see. The city of Vienna and the Snowbird Ski Resort posted their most negative comments over spectacular photography,

which made the bad comments funny. It was marketing jiu-jitsu at its best. Spirit Airlines created a place where unhappy passengers could vent, then rewarded them with 8,000 travel miles. And Liquid Death produces songs based on the worst comments it gets, then streams them all on Spotify. You have to laugh at the sheer audacity of these brands. They make money by steering into the skid, even if it does leave a little blood on the tracks when you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. This episode was recorded in the TearStream Mobile Recording Studio.

Producer Debbie O'Reilly. Chief Sound Engineer Jeff Devine. Under the influence theme by Casey Pick, Jeremiah Pick, and James Attengarden. Tunes provided by APM Music. Hey, let's be social. Follow me at TerryOInfluence. This podcast is powered by Acast.

See you next week. Fun fact. Hi, this is Paul Nazareth from Toronto, Ontario. The Vienna Zoo is the oldest zoo in the world. It was built in 1752 and is considered the most beautiful zoo in all of Europe.