Meteorite hoax sizzles out in Latvia
Thursday, November 5th, 2009 by Marita Upeniece
I usually don’t hear much news from my home country, Latvia, in the UK media, apart from the occasional stag do embarrassment. So it was quite exciting to see recent headlines about a meteorite crash in the Latvian countryside.
There was a shaky, eye-witness video clip, a big burning crater cordoned off by police and guarded by military; scientists were brought in to investigate - the whole shebang. Therefore, it was all the more disappointing to see an even bigger avalanche of news that followed shortly, revealing that it was a hoax staged by Tele2, one of Europe’s largest telecoms operators.
It has created a lot of discussion about the value of PR stunts, especially after Linda Murniece, Latvia’s Interior Minister threatened to cancel contracts with the company and ordered it to reimburse all costs incurred by emergency services.
The main problem with the hoax was the message (or more correctly, the lack of it). What was Tele2 trying to say to its customers by staging a hoax meteorite crash? It tried to explain itself in an emergency press conference the next day, claiming that their goal was “to draw attention away from Latvia’s economic crisis and toward something else more interesting”.
A strange and naive objective, considering that Latvia is suffering gravely from the crisis, with the highest unemployment in the EU and public sector salaries cut left, right and centre, and it doesn’t even explain what Tele2 stands for and what its values are. Also, everyone who worked at the site (including journalists) ended up looking rather silly and as a result Tele2 will probably be on the receiving end of insults for quite a while.
A hoax is a tricky thing at any time, but seeing the Tele2 stunt backfire so spectacularly, this seems like particularly bad timing. Even if creative and daring, deception is not very funny when you have to deal with serious problems such as unemployment. General deterioration of trust in brands and the rise of citizen journalism online are likely to make it more difficult to stage a brilliant hoax in the future and most PR people already seem to stay clear of the idea.
Of course that is if you don’t believe that the recession itself is one big hoax!
