Gary Lineker appears alongside Rolf Harris, Jimmy Savile and Fred West in disastrous Walkers campaign

The Walkers campaign video - with Jimmy Savile
The Walkers campaign video - with Jimmy Savile

In this post-Boaty McBoatface landscape, you'd think any company putting together a social media campaign would be aware that the public cannot, can absolutely not, be trusted to behave in the manner you would like them to.

Walkers Crisps, however, seem to have missed the memo. As a result, the company has been going through something of a social media disaster today, with the company tweeting out a large number of bad-taste short films.

One user submitted a picture of Rolf Harris
One user submitted a picture of Rolf Harris

The official Walkers Crisps Twitter account is running a competition in which followers are invited to submit a selfie for the chance to win tickets to the UEFA Champions League final.

Once a selfie has been tweeted, with the appropriate hashtag, it gets turned into a video in which Gary Linker appears to hold a copy of the selfie up while thanking the user.

Fred West
Fred West

"Nice selfie!" Gary enthuses, while giving the user-submitted pic an approving once-over.

"Here you are," he continues, "uniting with other fans outside the National Stadium of Wales." The selfie is then superimposed onto an animated crowd of supporters.

West

The trouble is, this works with any picture - and the official Walkers account will tweet out the results with seemingly no premoderation whatsoever.

Cue followers submitting pictures of convicted murders, mass-murderers, rapists, molesters - all of whom have then been incorporated into the cheery clip, appearing alongside Lineker's smiling, crisp-shilling visage.

The hashtag for the campaign has been one of the top trending topics throughout the afternoon, but presumably not for the reasons the company had hoped.

Many of the bad-taste images remained on Walkers timeline for more than an hour, although the account has since been removing some of them.

A spokesperson for Walkers said: “We recognise people were offended by irresponsible and offensive posts by individuals, and we apologise. We are equally upset and have shut down all activity.”

 

 

 

License this content