So what do you do when you are given the opportunity to do a campaign for the button-fly version of Levi’s most iconic line of jeans, one of the few lines of jeans that has mainstream appeal and is respected by denim heads? If you’re EVB, instead of capitalizing on the cache and heritage of the brand and the 501 line you are selling (and its countless advocates), you make creepy, talking penis monsters.
The money wasted on this lame attempt at viral could have been much better spent on outreach and advocacy tools for the pre-existing 501 community, capitalizing on the 501’s heritage and timelessness.
I don’t really need to post about this as it has been covered just about everywhereyoucanthinkof, but since I was there, I thought I would share my thoughts on it and provide a couple updates to the story. First of all, I didn’t think Sarah Lacy’s questions were that bad. I found some of them to be quite insightful. I was just more upset at how she started off the interview by attempting to humiliate Zuckerberg (very odd considering she was hand-picked by Facebook). He clearly wasn’t totally at ease to begin with and isn’t known to be very open so I doubt embarrassing him would encourage him to open up.
Also, her conversational interview style didn’t seem to work too well for him as she ended up talking far more than I think anybody would have liked to hear, leading to the mob uprising. While the way the audience reacted was not warranted, she reacted very poorly to the situation. If she had ignored them, the interview would have likely had a happier ending. Instead, she went on the defensive, lashing out at the audience and even her interviewee.
To make matters worse, in an interview she gave at a party shortly after the fiasco (nearly 40,000 views so far), she put the blame on not only the audience, but also the organizers, implying that what she was talking about was over the heads of the audience and that SXSW isn’t a good forum for someone of Mark Zuckerberg’s stature (funnily enough, he showed up and did an open Q&A at a Facebook Develop Garage the next day to some acclaim).
This dissolved all sympathy I had for her as her reaction to the situation clearly put her at just as much fault as the audience. Regardless of who was to blame this should have been the point where she apologized and admitted to having had a tough day, instead she insults the audience that includes a number of key influencers that could have a profound impact of the sales of her upcoming book. I wonder how her publishers reacted. I would love to know what their sales projections were for the book before the interview and whether or not they have shifted and in what direction.
