The Toilet Walls Strike Back
Are blogs the “toilet walls of the Internet”?
January 2006
The idea seemed like a good one: An ad campaign to buck up the German spirit and remind the depressive citizens of Europe’s largest (but struggling) economy that things really aren’t all that bad. Ad agencies, newspapers and a number of celebrities donated some €30 million-worth of advertising space to the nonprofit Du Bist Deutschland campaign launched last September. Ads appeared on billboards and television, in German magazines and movie theaters, and they featured pictures of the German great and good. Beethoven and Einstein made appearances; so did the boxer Max Schmeling and figure skater Katarina Witt—not to mention a luminous, sentimental photo of a human fetus developing in the womb.
“Du bist Deutschland” was the motto on every picture. “You are Germany.” You are talented, beautiful, intelligent, strong.
The aim of the campaign? “To fight grumpiness,” wrote Jean-Remy von Matt in an internal e-mail to his employees last October. Von Matt, 53, is the Belgian head of Jung von Matt, the prominent German ad firm that spearheaded the campaign. The e-mail was written after the “Du Bist Deutschland” campaign debuted to nationwide disdain. “The thanks: grumpiness,” von Matt went on. But the ill humor, “came only from the groups you wouldn’t expect anything else from.”
Von Matt whined briefly about the bile his campaign had generated among “intellectual journalists,” but he reserved his vitriol for bloggers. Weblogs, he wrote in the memo, are “the toilet walls of the Internet…. What on earth gives every computer owner the right to exude his opinion, unasked-for?... And most bloggers really just exude. This new, lowest level of opinion-forming becomes evident when you search for ‘Du bist Deutschland’ on www.technorati.com.”
Yes, and when you did that last weekend, after von Matt’s internal e-mail leaked onto the Web, “Du bist Deutschland” was Technorati’s most searched-for item—in the world—two slots above “bin Laden.” (Technorati indexes over 25 million blogs.) Also among the top five search terms were “toilet wall” and “Jung von Matt.”
“Oh, now I get it,” read one blog comment. “I thought ‘Jean Remy von Matt’ was either some kind of pompous ‘nom de plume,’ or just some low-level moron at an ad agency somewhere. Now I see he’s really, truly the creative ‘genius’ behind ‘Du bist Deutschland’ itself.”
“Herr Jean-Remy von Matt,” read another scribble, which dared tell the man how to do his job, “if the ‘largest nonprofit ad campaign in history’ (sic!) hasn’t come off the way you wanted, the fault doesn’t lie with your target audience.”
“I am a toilet wall,” read another sarcastic doodle. “And proud of it.”
Catching a whiff of bad publicity Jean-Remy quickly moved to apologize. On Monday, he sent an earnest e-mail to a number of top German bloggers to say he was sorry.
“My mother taught me something,” he wrote. “If you make a mistake, apologize.” He admitted he was wrong to question the basic right if democratic self-expression by insulting bloggers. But, he wrote, “I was agitated, and I wrote an e-mail to my colleagues, who had worked hard for months on the campaign and deserved some encouragement against the criticism, justified or unjustified. Maybe I sounded a little envious to you, since the form of self-expression I’ve engaged in for over 30 years as an ad copywriter must seem anything but free: Every word has to be weighed, negotiated with clients, and then tested later for effectiveness.
“However! Even if most of the criticism of my e-mail was serious and constructive, I still see it as a breach of respect that an internal memo of mine could be sent scampering like a sow through Little Bloggerville…. Doesn’t the blogosphere,” he wrote, “have a sense of privacy?”
Had the man even read a blog before?
“What strikes me,” wrote Jens Scholz, a Web designer who published the first von Matt e-mail on his blog last week and published the apology Monday, “is that either he’s quite brave, or still in the dark about the effects of his words, and about what blogs really are…. His attitude hasn’t changed; he’s still giving advice to people he doesn’t understand.”
And the Du Bist Deutschland campaign? The ads have spawned so much criticism and satire that a Google search doesn’t even bring up the campaign’s Web site on its first page. People complain in English, German and Dutch—one rabbi in the United States criticizes the inclusion of Einstein. “Portraying Einstein as a paragon of German national culture should offend all people,” wrote Rabbi Brad Hirschfeld in the Jewish magazine Forward. “Were it not for the safe haven that Einstein found in the United States, he, like most of Europe’s Jews, would likely have been murdered in the German-led Holocaust.”
It also didn’t help the campaign that a photo from a Nazi convention in 1935 surfaced last November with a poster of Hitler’s face and the slogan “Denn Du Bist Deutschland”—which, if it’s real, would damn the current sentimental-kitsch campaign. Historians, though, have said the slogan wasn’t part of the Nazis’ usual propaganda repertoire, and would have been easy to overlook. And — if it’s any consolation for the beleaugered team at Jung von Matt — neo-Nazis loathe the campaign’s multiculturalism. “Seeing that made me want to vomit,” reads one comment on a white supremacist site.
Still, nothing’s better for the spirits of a blogging community than an out-of-touch media personality to kick around, and the von Matt affair may prove to be a watershed for German blogs. Less than a year ago, a statistic made the rounds that Iran had more blogs (65,000) than Germany (42,000)—closely followed by an English top-ten list of the possible reasons why. Now, though, with a globally disdained whipping boy to pound on, German blogs might just be on the way up.
“Our campaign, for a few days, reached not just Germany but the entire world,” blogger Iris Bleyer wrote in an entry intended for von Matt. “If you want to achieve that kind of coverage with your ads someday, then pay close attention to what the toilet walls of the Internet have done.”
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” chimed in Jens Scholz. “This is just the beginning.”
Michael Scott Moore
