HELLO LITERALLY EVERYONE! I’ve been AWOL a few weeks thanks to Cannes & a couple hoops tournaments, but I’m BACK. And even better: I’ve got a brand new office! Which means MORE CONTENT! Includinggg a YouTube account about marketing and my own consultancy… but more on that as they develop. |
Today, we’re talking about DoorDash’s recent viral stunt, and… |
The legal issues with DoorDash’s T-Pain trickery Why FTC laws are vital to protect consumers Why these campaigns irritate the hell out of me
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I learn more slurping spaghetti with my sponsors & other marketers than I do at any ~industry panel~. |
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Let's be really real—most panels & keynotes ask total softball, basic questions (I swear if I hear one more talk on authenticity I will scream). You spend the whole session wishing YOU were the moderator. |
But the best new trend in IRL networking is the organized industry dinner event. I just hit my second Social Supper Club with my partners at Caliber & got a bunch of actually helpful advice for my business by just passing the burrata (ugh, now I want more burrata). Highlyyy suggest you try to hit one (and get on their email list, they drop actually great educational reads called… wait for it… The Drop). Sign up right here! |
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It really, really irritates me when brands ignore consumer protection laws just because they want to ~go viral~ on social media. Doubly so when it involves influencers not revealing they were paid to promote brands. |
DoorDash and celebrity singer/streamer T-Pain ran a Twitter stunt last week that went hyper viral… and literally only worked because they deceived consumers into thinking a silly mix-up happened, when in reality, the whole thing was staged. A pretty clear violation of FTC disclosure rules. A move so blatantly not okay that tweeters used the Community Note feature to call the brand out (we’ll get to that part later). |
Let’s run through the stunt, where the problems lie, and why this stuff gets under my skin. |
The Stunt |
During a World Cup match, DoorDash started live-tweeting at T-Pain, congratulating him on his performance on the pitch. |
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T-Pain does not play soccer. Tim Payne plays soccer. What we were all led to believe: whoever runs DoorDash social made a hysterical/ridiculous mistake and “accidentally” congratulated the rapper instead of the footballer.
On its head, funny! When brands make social media mistakes, people laugh. This would’ve been a massive “mistake,” especially because of T-Pain’s reaction, publicly asking DoorDash to stop tagging him in the posts. |
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And hey, it certainly went viral! Even at a quick glance, I’m seeing at least 15 million Twitter impressions from T-Pain and DoorDash, and that’s not counting the exponential earned media value from press pick-up, which was significant!
The exchange ended when DoorDash sent T-Pain a bunch of soccer + New Zealandish items, which he documented on his Twitter account. |
But here’s what pisses me off. |
The entire stunt was fake, and only worked because the brand blatantly ignored consumer protection laws. |
The entire back-and-forth was a paid activation. It was all staged, and made to look like it was really happening by not revealing publicly that the brand paid the celebrity.
You see how that last tweet from T-Pain’s account has #DoorDashPartner prominently in the caption? That language should’ve been present in every single tweet he made tagging DoorDash. He’s a long-term partner of the brand, and every time he promotes them, disclosing that relationship is required. |
Why didn’t DoorDash & T-Pain properly disclose?
Simple: they knew this stunt wouldn’t work if they did. |
THAT IS WHY THE LAWS EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE. |
We work in advertising. It’s straight up not okay to trick consumers into consuming our advertising. It’s not okay to use celebrity influence to get people to like your brand without telling people that celebrity is paid by your brand. Humans are so susceptible to following the lead of celebrities—that's the whole reason celebrity endorsements cost what they cost! People trust the people they admire. They let their guard down when they see a familiar face. Someone scrolling at night sees a celebrity they like caught up in something that feels real, and they buy in, because they have no reason not to. |
That trust is the only thing a regular person has going for them against a brand with a budget, a strategy, and a team whose entire job is separating them from their money. Disclosure is the thing that gives them a fair shot. It flips their guard back on. Tell people it's paid and they can decide for themselves how much to care. Hide it and you've taken that decision away from them on purpose. DoorDash knew exactly what they were doing, and worse, seem to be bragging about it? |
The DoorDash team is flexing that they broke the rules? |
I wrote a longgg LinkedIn post early last week about this DoorDash / T-Pain stunt and what I found ethically wrong about it. Plenty of debate ensued in the comment section. In one conversation that the commenter has since deleted, I explained the legal issues and asked the guy if he thought that because it went viral, the laws shouldn’t matter.
Who liked my comment? DoorDash’s Head Of Social Zaria Parvez, a significant figure in the social media industry after leading Duolingo for many years. Kindaaa feel like the only way to read that like is yeahhh, we don’t care! |
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My writing about the stunt led to The Verge reporter Mia Sato reaching out to Parvez, asking some questions about the Twitter exchanges.
In the interview, Parvez gave a media-trained answer, stating it was a “partnership.” |
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Mia and I chatted a bit through Twitter replies, where I asked if the legality of the move was questioned in the interview. To no one’s surprise, she said “I actually did ask the company about the legal questions at play here (both if it were indeed a campaign and if it weren’t)—DoorDash didn’t respond directly to that question unfortunately. |
Sit with that for a second. A reporter gave DoorDash a clean shot to say "we followed the rules, here's how," and they said nothing. When a company that just did a victory lap about "fueling the frenzy" suddenly loses its voice the moment you ask if the frenzy was legal, that IS the answer. You don't go quiet on a question you can answer well. You go quiet when the honest answer hurts. |
We as marketers cannot use corporate dollars to deceive consumers, and “but it went viral” is an awful excuse. |
Here's what actually gets me, and it's bigger than DoorDash. |
We are going to celebrate this. Somebody's already got it in a "brands winning at social" deck. We're going to see "15 million impressions off a World Cup moment" and clap, and the disclosure stuff will get waved off as a technicality, as me being a buzzkill, as legal-team nonsense that doesn't matter because look at the numbers. |
That instinct is the exact reason the social media industry doesn’t get taken seriously half the time. We say we want a seat at the table. We say we want marketing treated like a real discipline instead of the fun department that makes the memes. Then a stunt built on deceiving millions of people runs, and instead of being the first ones to call it out, we're the ones sharing it as inspiration. |
I promise you, brands are going to start getting sanctioned for this stuff. It’s happened before, it’s gonna happen again. |
My ask to you: we have the budgets to make genuinely incredible work. We have the talent. Make the funniest, sharpest, most creative thing anyone's seen all year. Just don't lie to do it. Tell people what's an ad. That's the whole rule. It's not hard, and it's not a creativity killer, it's the one line that separates what we do from just tricking people out of their attention. |
We can be the most creative people in the room without being the least honest ones. |
By the way, consumers hateee being fooled |
While yeah, DoorDash got significant attention for the stunt, if you go back to T-Pain’s tweets now, you’ll find this little addition: |
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When Twitter users realized the entire thing was an undisclosed ad, tweeters actively added a Community Note to the post, making sure everyone knew it was a “sponsored post pretending to not be.” |
And if you go to the final tweet of the campaign where T-Pain finally used that #DoorDashPartner tag, these are the most engaged replies: |
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No one’s cancelling their DoorDash subscription over this, but it’s genuinely not hard to make creative ideas that are effective AND don’t inspire these responses. |
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