Viral Campaign Fail: Mother’s Paternity Quest Sells Denmark As One-Night Stand Hot Spot

So my fake viral radar’s gotten pretty good over the past few years, but every once in a while I get fooled, just like everyone else. On Saturday, I was one of the thousands of people who watched Karen, a 27-year-old Danish woman, ask the world for help tracking down the father of her baby son August, whom she said had been conceived during a drunken one-night stand. The man, whose name she claimed not to remember due to the amount of alcohol they’d consumed that night, was a tourist who’d disappeared the following morning, and she simply wanted to let him know that he had a son for his “and August’s sake.”

Sure it sounds a little fishy, but it’s a big, strange world out there and the story had the potential to be a real Web 2.0 fairy tale, which I’m just enough of a romantic to buy into. In addition, I also believed it was real — or at the very least unconnected to an advertising campaign — on the grounds that someone thinking a potential paternity suit was a good marketing device was an idea too stupid to contemplate.

Does that make me or the folks at VisitDenmark.com the bigger fool? No clue. But the fact remains that Mashable, via the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, revealed the video to be a hoax perpetrated by the Danish government in order to sell the country as a tourist destination to the web community. Karen was played by the actress Ditte Arnth Jorgensen (known as Ditte Arnth on IMDB), and baby August is not hers.

Since the reveal of the hoax, both the original video and the fake site, featuring photos of “Karen” with “August,” have been taken offline, but despite the public backlash, those responsible for the ad are standing by it. VisitDenmark CEO Dorte Kiilerich told the Danish newspaper Politiken:

Karen’s story shows that Denmark is a broad-minded country where you can do what you want. The film is a good example of independent, dignified, Danish women who dare to make their own choices…We tell a good and sweet story about a mature, responsible woman who lives in a free society and shoulders the responsibility of her actions. And she uses a modern social medium.

And the advertising agency Grey Group, which created the spot, claims it’s a major success, citing 1.9 million Google searches and 773,000 YouTube viewings. Of course, that’s before the video was taken down, for reasons that haven’t yet been admitted — my theory is that VisitDenmark didn’t believe the hoax would be uncovered so quickly, and thus had no contingency plan in place. (A cautionary tale for all you viral marketers out there.)

Kiilerich’s comments try to contextualize this video as being a flattering portrait of Danish women, which is an assessment that I’ll leave to Danish women to confirm (in the interest of fairness, Googling confirms that Dorte Kiilerich is a woman, or at least a woman’s name). But I really wish that Don Draper wasn’t a fictional character, because I’d love to know what he thought of this.

Advertising is supposed to sell an idea, a concept, an experience. But when you get down to brass tacks, the experience being promoted by this campaign is that of drunken, unprotected sex with women who won’t remember your name the next day. And anyone who really craves that kind of good time doesn’t need to venture internationally for it.