Cashing in on tragedy. It’s a grubby business, but someone’s got to do it, right? Right? The recent death of Amy Winehouse isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, time a bunch of suits have moved quickly to rake in as much moolah as possible on the back of an awful situation. But does it have to be that way?

It’s a fact that death sells. We know that. We have to be accepting that, in the society we live in, it’s the job of some people to try and make money out of it. But is it OK for anyone to try and grab a piece of the pie? And even if you feel you are entitled to some of it, does it matter how you go about getting it?

When it comes to businesses gaining from the story and media publishers reporting on it, it’s essential to split these into two categories: Businesses and media publishers whose content IS related, in some way, to Amy Winehouse and businesses and media publishers whose content ISN’T.

• Microsoft’s Zune, iTunes and Amazon, all music services, clearly, work in a relevant field.
• Mashable, “the largest independent news source dedicated to covering digital culture, social media and technology” do not.
• The more general media, including the music press, do.

So, when Zune tweet “Remember Amy Winehouse by downloading the ground-breaking Back to Black over at Zune,” we accept that yes, the message is in the right place, but is it the right message? Well no, obviously. It’s uncomfortably opportunistic, there’s no respect paid at all, this is just gleeful £££-in-the-eyes time. Social media being social media, they faced a backlash, of course. But it’s OK, they issued a “weasel worded” apology – “Apologies to everyone if our earlier Amy Winehouse ‘download’ tweet seemed purely commercially motivated. Far from the case, we assure you”…FAIL.

Mashable, and I’ll repeat “the largest independent news source dedicated to covering digital culture, social media and technology”, also covered the story, sloppily adding a digital media element, as if there’s a single media story that can’t be given the same angle these days. It was an article “incongruous in the context of their audience“, we can see right through it (*cough* link-bait *cough*) and it doesn’t look good…FAIL.

Less than a day after her passing, the Huffington Post UK reported that “for small business owners there is, however, a lot to be learned from Amy’s untimely death,” and a nation smashed its collective palm into its collective head at the stupidity of it all. Insensitive, crass, WTF!?…FAIL.

Apple and Amazon also faced criticism for pushing her albums in the wake of the tragedy. Facing little backlash, certainly in comparison to Microsoft, it goes to show that as customers and critics, we have strict definitions of where the line is drawn in the sand. For me, and I think most people, Microsoft’s blatancy pushed them over that line.

You could argue that a newspaper splashing Amy stories over its front page, a music magazine writing a tribute to her or even an article talking about how marketers dealt with the issue could be seen as exploitative to gain traffic/sales. But celebrity news, music and marketing would be the stock-in-trade of these publishers so, as long as the message is sensitive and relevant, it’s surely fair game.

What’s striking in the light of the death of Amy Winehouse is that it seems that none of the businesses or publishers who sought to profit from it did anything to mask their profiteering. Perhaps those music downloading services and shops could have donated a percentage of profits to a charity or at least provided a link to relevant charities? As Kent House opined, Microsoft certainly should have.

But most of all, in situations like this, marketers should forget their training and remember that “common sense, tact, timing, class…are required to be a good PR consultant or journalist”. Sadly, as long as there are writers like Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry out there who think that Microsoft’s tweet “wasn’t particularly tacky” (as if that was what anyone had accused it of being!), marketers will continue to drag themselves through the dirt.

by Paul Barnett