#MakeItHappy: Coca-cola Tricked Into Quoting Mein Kampf On Twitter Campaign

Coca-Cola recently launched their "Make it Happy" advertising campaign, which featured a commercial in the Super Bowl and also extended to twitter hashtag #MakeItHappy.

The idea for the hashtag was that the company wanted people to reply to negative tweets with #MakeItHappy, which would alert an algorithm that Coke had developed which converts the negative tweets into ASCII art—an image made from text—of joyful things.

For instance, the words from the tweet would be reformed into a picture of a balloon dog or a cat in sunglasses playing the drums.

So far, so cutesy. But Gawker decided to have some fun with the campaign and got their Editorial Labs director Adam Pash to build a twitter bot, @MeinCoke, to tweet lines form Hitler's infamous autobiography and Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf.

Coke's algorithm then dutifully turned the notorious words of hate and intolerance into cute drawings, before realising what had happened and suspending the campaign with their tails between their legs.

Naturally they weren't too happy with Gawker, issuing the following statement to Ad Week. "The #MakeItHappy message is simple: The Internet is what we make it, and we hoped to inspire people to make it a more positive place. It's unfortunate that Gawker is trying to turn this campaign into something that it isn't. Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign."

Check out some of the images Coke created from Mein Kampf, below.

via Gawker, The Guardian