A Faux Paux is a Faux Paux – regardless of the channel

Mashable: “Harrass a Booth Babe”: A Twitter Contest Too Far?July 25th, 2009 | by Pete Cashmore51 Com”

Electronic Arts marketing team had a clever idea to grab mindshare at ComicCon 2009

And mindshare is just what they got (#eafail)- but as with any bad idea, not from the quarters they wanted. You just had to cringe today when the promotion was highlighted today on CNBC as the “bad idea” of the month as the the women journalists dumped all over the company. You also have to wonder if EA has any women on the marketing team.

Hiring pretty women and dressing them in tight-fitting skimpy clothing is a time-honored means of building booth traffic. I’ve done it myself (hiring only professional models, never the company staff.) But there is a difference between hiring and respecting professionals and recruiting and encouraging the masses to assault these women who are merely making a living representing companies at the event.

It would be disingenuous to pretend that the EA marketing staff didn’t sit around and discuss the likely results and pretend that since they weren’t present that EA wasn’t the cause.

I would encourage the producers of ComicCon to consider banning EA from next year’s event as punishment. I doubt that morality will triumph over economics, but it would be nice to think that someone would act honorably here