"Life is harsh," according to the ad campaign for Sauza Tequila. But the company found out last week that the Web - by giving individuals the same tools as marketers - can be even harsher.
The company's Web site, harsh.com, tries to prove how harsh life (as compared to its hooch) can be by linking to a Harsh Site of the Day. Last Friday, it chose E. Stephen Mack's tongue-in-cheek tribute to disappeared early-'90s rapper Vanilla Ice. Little did harsh know that Mack doesn't think much of alcohol marketers. Mack replaced his Ice tribute with a long anti-alcohol screed, complete with photos of car wrecks and a vivid description of fetal alcohol syndrome. Way harsh. Hours after discovering what Mack had done, the operators of harsh.com switched to a different site.
Mack says he's not against alcohol per se. In fact, when harsh.com first notified him of its choice, "My first reaction was, 'Great,'" he says. But then he took a look at the site. "It really rubbed me the wrong way."
Several of the Harsh Sites of the Day have been about what you'd expect: the Heartless Bitches homepage; the Dog Diaper page. But others are more of a mystery. One was a serious page about gynecological exams. Another was a rather innocuous Michael Jackson fan page, the link to which bore the label: "*WARNING* No one under the age of 18 should open this link unless supervised by a parent."
"Our goal is to link to ironic, funny sites," says Lori Tieszen, marketing director for Domecq Importers, which runs the site. Mack's "very anti-alcohol message didn't fit our criteria," as his Vanilla Ice tribute page did, she said. (Mack himself wonders at the site's choice of that page, which was simply an otherwise blank page that read, "This page contains everything I like about the musical phenomenon formerly and formally known as Vanilla Ice ... yup yup.")
"It seemed to me they were taking advantage of people by linking to these serious sites," says Mack. He quit drinking several years ago for personal reasons, but says he's not stridently anti-alcohol, and that he sees nothing wrong with drinking responsibly.
"What's my purpose here?" he asks on his page. "Mostly I wanted to tweak Sauza a little - if they use my site as some kind of offshoot of their promotion of themselves, then they deserve whatever they link to. Freedom of the speech, freedom of the Web. Long live the First Amendment."
