Mad Men's Twitter-Related Kerfuffle
O Great Internet, what silly and almost nonsensical story do you have for us today? Ah, one about Twitter and the excellent AMC drama series Mad Men. For a couple of weeks now, "employees" at the fictional advertising agency Sterling Cooper have been sending Twitter messages to each other and other users, hinting at events on the show and just creating a sort of second internet world for the series. And now, of course, people have intervened and the whole thing has been shut down. What could have been cleverly co-opted and adapted into a subtle viral marketing campaign has now been yanked from the interwaves (most likely by reactionary lawyers, our ad dept suspects), deeply upsetting committed yet attention-deficit Twitterers. This is reminiscent of NBC's rabid squashing of any content on YouTube that relates to its shows. I can understand entire episodes being pulled, but little clips here and there seem to increase buzz and to potentially earn the shows (specifically SNL) some new fans. While on a smaller scale than NBC's watchdoggery, folks at AMC cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when they silenced the tweets-essentially calling the one or two sentences-long Twitter messages (Twitter messages!!! I hardly know what those are!) unauthorized fanfiction, and therefore verboten. As Alejandra Ramos points out, it's pretty ironic that the show about advertising fails to recognize a good opportunity to... advertise.