To be fair, there’s always a marketing agency behind a campaign and I guess in this case it’s Thinkhouse.
Who knows what kind of budget they offered for music production (it has gotten worse and worse over the years)? Music always comes last in a marketing chain and is often belittled. We don’t know the facts but assuming they just spent the bare minimum on music then that’s what you get: Suno.
D’Addario is surely not happy but they should have reacted differently by being transparent and straight forward. Everyone makes mistakes and an honest apology goes a long way.
The greatest mystery of all. Even an unpacking video, of each string exiting their vacuum satchel squeaky clean and shiny, accompanied by the ploink ploink ploink of a string being tuned up would persuade me more than that video. Could it be that I’m getting old? Who knows.
You’d reckon companies have learned their mistake after how well the Inclusive Teletubbies Jaguar commercial turned out. I suppose they think a company who built their business over selling good products and letting the product speak for itself would benefit from a bit of social media lies and deception.
Here’s the underlying message that this scandal sends to me:
D’Addario doesn’t support musicians if that means they’d actually have to pay them. Instead, they went with the cheapest possible alternative and had an employee generate some terribly mediocre AI slop and let him mime to it in a product video. If you don’t want to hire professional musicians so that they can make a living, well, that’s exactly what you get. Surprise
I still find it hard to believe that not a single person at D’Addario could tell the difference between an original and AI slop. They deal with a music related product, right? That’s why I really don’t buy that noone had a clue at all. Deleting negative comments under false pretenses and desperate cover-ups weren’t exactly helpful, either.
D’Addarios statement “If AI replaces musicians, then we’re out of business” might turn out to be true - in their case sooner than they’ve realized. Personally, I’m done with D’Addario. Even though it’s just strings, it’s also a matter of principles and ethics. It’s okay to make a mistake. But after all these repeated lies, cover-ups and half-baked apologies - that’s it for me for the foreseeable future. This might sound overly dramatic but at the end of the day it’s just my personal decision to let my vallet do the talking. That’s all.
Taking your Thinkhouse post into consideration, what I think happened was they’re tripling down because the money was already invested in the marketing campaign and they don’t want to lose it, even if that means defending the indefensible. They’re the largest manufacturer of music accessories after all and profit speaks a bit louder in this case.
A marketing agency’s client (in this case D’Addario) always approves the final cut (including music) before anything goes live. So at least someone at HQ must have known what’s going on. They were surely aware that the promo video has caused an outrage and they surely looked into it.
Maybe you are right and someone at Thinkhouse or D’Addario suggested to triple down on desperate cover-ups and lies. Unfortunately, this strategy of feeding people with ‘alternative facts’ has become a new standard in corporate life, too. All the more reason to vote with my vallet
