Written by Jonas Klit Nielsen
A weekend of turbulent debate surrounding the viral campaign “Danish Mother Seeking” is coming to an end.
After giving an interview to TV2 Nyhederne (Danish National news), they have returned and told me that they will bring the story of who is behind in the 7 pm News.
The biggest issue of the mysterious campaign is now if it has been a success or not.
If there was a good cause behind the video on YouTube that might be able to justify its attempt to gather support and sympathy – then we could understand. The only problem is, there doesn’t seem to be.
Our hope would be that a campaign like this, which obviously plays with people’s emotions, would at least be used to promote a good cause, like children needing parents. But sadly that doesn’t seem to be the case.
To the untrained eye there is no way of knowing that ‘Danish Mother Seeking’ isn’t real. There is no way of knowing that by helping Karen spread her video to help her find the father of her baby, one isn’t helping Karen, one is helping someone else get attention. And that is essentially in our opinion what’s wrong with the campaign.
When we first saw the video on YouTube we were 95% certain that it was fake, and we were surprised about the number of people all over the world caring for Karen and little baby boy August. After writing that we thought it was fake, we made the YouTube video ‘Danish Mother Seeking (The Father’s Story)’ hoping that it would make people realise that the whole think was fake. We made the response to Karen’s video as a comic relief, and we made sure that it was obvious that ‘the father’ was false. We did this by using fake teeth, bad acting (sorry Sebastian) and a strong Danish accent. And by uploading the video to Mindjumper’s YouTube Channel, we made it easy for people to find out that the ‘father’ was actually the creative director of Mindjumpers.
When the hunt about finding the people behind the campaign went in we had a lot of different angles on who could be behind. Who would make a viral success like this using a lie to play with people’s emotions? In our opinion they must have either miscalculated what social media is about (in short social media is about humans, feelings, thoughts and transparency and about people interacting with each other) or have a good enough cause to justify the campaign methods.
Now the next chapter is going to be interesting. Looking at the amount of views the video has gotten on YouTube the campaign has been a huge success. It has created a lot of awareness. But the awareness has been created under false pretences – under a lie and it will probably end up pushing people away from whichever brand or product is behind it instead of pulling people closer like advertising is supposed to do
As a company working with social media and believing that these new media are powerful and that they are a must for brands, businesses and organisations to be a part of, it scares us a little to see a campaign build on lies and secrecy. This campaign might even end up scaring organisations away from using the social media platforms because of all the negative response it might end up getting.
Brands, businesses and organisations play an important part in these new media. At Mindjumpers we believe that companies can use social media campaigns to do something good in the world. Cases like Kelloggs Cares, Target and organisations like Charity:Water or LIVESTRONG are successful proof that you can create a powerful social media platform from where your brand can interact with people and at the same time contribute to a greater good.
But lets see what the next couple of days will bring the debate and how the world will react on the misleading Karen campaign.
Similar Posts:
- Social Good on Social Media
- Can an Unknown Brand Become Word of Mouth?
- Old Spice Spoof nails it! New Spice – Study like a Scholar, Scholar
Good that not everybody thinks like you. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had this experience or Lonelygirl15, Dynamite Surfing, Blair Witch project and a lot of other clever and inspiring ways of using new media channels….and obviously you wouldn’t have been interviewed for TV2 tonight. 15 min of fame?
All in all I can’t really see the problem here, I think this video has been a great demasking of media being tweaked in different directions. The traditional media broadcasting the story without checking if it was real didn’t do what they are supposed to do in my opinion in terms of validating a story. If this represent business as usual in the news industry it must be quite easy to be a PR agency these days 
That was crap VisitDenmark Not funny, not creative just crap
By the way Jonas, was I right that you and Mindjumpers were the Svengalis behind this.
@Lars – maybe we can just agree to disagree
@rhrbjorn No – sorry, but we did not have anything to do with this campaign!
WOW, you are sooooooo clever…. eeeh not.. you SUCK losers
There’s another possible explanation to the ” research” that mindjumpers does, as they might be using “the seeking mother” in their own advantage, to gain more publicity for themselves! I’m not yet confident whether the seeking mother video is false or not, but I am sure that you are using the publicity to bring attention to your company/site/etc.
@Nazar, We work with social media and marketing, that´s why we are so interested and is researching, giving our perspective and trying to get other peoples perspective – nothing to hide there, everything we are you can find on this blog site.
Visitdenmark have deleted all my comments here today, This means war. I’ll be back again and again!
The original video posters are deleting comments like crazy, trying to do damage control.
Amateurs. So much for “freedom of speech in Denmark”. Around 600 post since the TV news spot aired.
I am adopted and take offense to this fake video. In response to this I will not spend any holiday money in Denmark. Denmark is one of the most boring and expensive destinations in the world. The weather is usually shit too, avoid!
[...] LATEST POST: Danish Mother Seeking – revealed in an hour and the next mystery can start… [...]
It wasn’t really thought through. It also shows how extremely difficult it is to create viral events “in the lab”, because you can’t really predict how something will behave once it gets big. It could easily backfire.
VisitDenmark didn’t put enough thought into the cross-cultural interpretation of the video. Something which may be considered positive in Denmark might not go down so well outside Scandinavia.I first heard about the story from a Swedish paper, and that was before it was exposed as a hoax. The general reaction in Sweden seemed to be one of shock at the irresponsibility of Karen. What does that say about how it would have gone over in more conservative but also desirable target nations like the USA, India or China?
The video will most likely serve as a lesson for how not to run a nation-level viral campaign, and it would probably dissuade other countries from doing this sort of thing at all, unless they feel they have a campaign that has palatability guarantees. It’s a pity for Denmark, and one can already see that many ordinary Danes are bewildered that the campaign launched in the first place, and that it had far from the desired effect for Denmark’s image.