EarthLink's Captive Audience
Ad campaign tells public restroom users, 'EarthLink Protects Your Privates.'

March 05, 2001

Jim Welte

The business world's appetite for uncharted advertising space--which has consumed banana stickers, coffee cup wraps, and airplane snacks in recent times, has made its way to, um, new depths. Starting last week, women at various bars and restaurants in Austin, Texas and Washington, D.C. receive the following message on disposable toilet-seat covers: "EarthLink (ELNK, info) Protects Your Privates."

Men receive the same tagline at public urinals in yet another EarthLink marketing effort designed to lure some of AOL Time Warner's (AOL, info) approximately 30 million users to its Internet service. The Internet service provider, which trails market leader AOL by more than 25 million users and has previously run ad campaigns encouraging AOL customers to "Get Out of AOL" and "Opt Out of AOL," is focusing its current efforts on AOL's consumer privacy protections, or lack thereof. EarthLink contends that AOL bombards its users with advertisements and sells user data to other marketers.

"We created this ad to further illuminate the growing importance of Internet privacy and to let people know that not all ISPs or online services have the same level of commitment to privacy protection," says Claudia Caplan, vice president of brand marketing for EarthLink. "Our message--and a key point of differentiation--is that EarthLink is not in the business of exploiting its subscribers' personal data."

As long as EarthLink doesn't sell its user data to marketers, which it contends it doesn't, then the campaign's message and competitive positioning are sound, say several branding experts. Its choice of venue, on the other hand, could use some refinement.

"They run the risk of cheapening the brand by the environment in which they're putting it," says Daryl Travis, CEO of Brandtrust Consultants. "There are plenty of other creative avenues that someone could take without running the risk of soiling the brand, if you will. This basically says that no matter how bad AOL is, we're willing to sink lower."

While bathroom humor has inched its way into the advertising mainstream over the last few years, it simply misses its mark in this case, says Elizabeth Goodgold, chief of The Nuancing Group in San Diego. "It made sense for 7Up with its "Up Yours" campaign, because they were going against Mountain Dew, which is a very edgy brand and their core audience was young males," says Goodgold. "But when there are 30 million AOL users, how can they be assured that that group is so homogenous that they're going to understand this humor? Out of that 30 million user base, are most of them cool, hip, edgy consumers? My answer would be no." Steve McKee, president of McKee Wallwork Henderson, an advertising agency in Albuquerque, N.M., notes the irony in sending a privacy-protecting message in one of the last bastions of individual privacy. "They're invading our privacy in order to let us know that they're protecting our privacy," he says.

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