When you were envisioning what the future might look like, did you ever think that 2018 would bring a major detergent brand being forced to warn consumers not to eat pre-packaged laundry pods? Indeed, of the hundreds of images that riff on the so-called "Tide Pod challenge" — an internet inside joke that has led hundreds of fame-hungry online citizens to put the laundry pods in their mouth and (usually) pretend to consume them — there is one meme in particular that does a good job summarizing the absurdity of this faux-trend. It reads:
1968: In 50 years time I bet we’ll have bases on the Moon and put a human on Mars.
2018: Doctors concerned that ‘Tide Pod’ meme causing people to eat laundry detergent.
The ridiculousness of the Tide Pod challenge, surely, has contributed to its virality. Since December, the Procter & Gamble company, owners of the Tide brand, have faced an unprecedented swell of publicity surrounding Tide Pods, their packaged laundry pod brand, as a result of the meme.
It is, in part, understandable; after all, the packaged laundry pods definitely resemble candy—for this reason, young children and adults with dementia have accidentally consumed them. While there have been reports of people accidentally eating the pods surfacing since 2013, the eating-tide-pods meme became increasingly popular after humor site CollegeHumor posted a sketch titled “Don’t Eat the Laundry Pods” in March 2017. This might have been the gateway to the “Tide Pod challenge," a competition in which teens post videos of themselves chewing on packaged laundry pods.
Preventing children and adults from eating Tide Pods is a serious matter. Indeed, the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) issued a statement on Jan. 22 stating that in one week in 2018, the AAPCC saw 47 cases of “intentional exposures cases” to laundry pods among teens, bringing the 2018 total to 86 teens.
“We cannot stress enough how dangerous this is to the health of individuals — it can lead to seizure, pulmonary edema, respiratory arrest, coma, and even death,” Stephen Kaminski, JD, AAPCC’s CEO and executive director, said in a statement.
Despite warnings from the company and public health groups, the dark joke about eating laundry pods has become an internet phenomenon. The national press has reported on it. Countless memes have have been shared about it. Celebrities have commented on it. A pizzeria in Brooklyn has created Tide Pod pizzas that they call “Pied Pods.” A North Carolina bakery makes Tide Pod doughnuts. And there's an online recipe for a "Tide Pod Challenge shot," made from blue curaçao, orange vodka and white chocolate liqueur.
Tide Pods are a household name, and now teens and young adults everywhere are seeing the brand's name in their social media feeds many times a day. It’s the kind of publicity that a brand would pay thousands, even millions of dollars to obtain. Except in this case, this publicity is linked to jokes about death.
The Tide Pod challenge meme presents a public relations crisis that is perpetuated by the speed and vastness of the internet, and it is now totally out of Tide’s control — which some experts say could constitute a modern public relations nightmare.
“If the internet turns on you, you have to do a lot of work,” says Victoria Vix Reitano, a digital marketing and social media expert and the CEO of CreatiVix Media. “The internet has the most unlimited memory in the world. Tide would have to spend quite a bit of money and focus on original content to make these searches go away [in order to recover].”
The quick pace of the internet has changed the public relations landscape — putting brands like Tide Pods under the microscope and subjecting them to ceaseless public scrutiny as the meme spreads.
“You can’t delete it, but you can have a good response to it that becomes aligned with the story,” Reitano said.
Erik Bernstein, vice president of Bernstein Crisis Management, said the response to a crisis like this is “proportionate to the threat.”
“In this case Tide’s PR team has one primary mission -- make certain nobody, and I mean nobody, could even possibly think the brand endorses eating their product,” Bernstein said. “As long as the brand continues to use every opportunity to say, “Hey, don’t eat Tide pods” then there shouldn’t be significant recovery needed."
The PR team at Procter & Gamble has worked with social media sites like YouTube to remove Tide Pod challenge videos, and even enlisted Robert Gronkowski, tight end for the New England Patriots, to make a PSA video warning the public not to eat Tide Pods.
In an email to Salon, Procter & Gamble spokeswoman Petra Renck said the Tide team was very worried about the meme.
“Nothing is more important to us than the safety of people who use our products,” Renck said. “We are deeply concerned about the intentional and improper use of liquid laundry pacs by young people engaging in intentional self-harm challenges."
Renck outlined the steps they’ve taken to avert the crisis, including working with social media networks to remove content that encourages the harmful behavior, and distributing a safety message on various social channels.
“We are engaging with people on social media to continue to communicate that laundry pacs are made to clean clothes,” she said.
When asked if sales had been affected, Renck said: “We’ve not seen a measurable impact on sales of Tide Pods since this social conversation began."
Bernstein said that in this case, the old adage “any press is good press” likely doesn’t apply.
“I don’t know if I’d say it’s a dream come true,” Bernstein said. “I would imagine a few people at Tide lost sleep when the trend first began.”
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