The year is 2008. “Social Networking” is on its feverish rise, and every company was getting on top of it. Companies were starting to use Twitter and Facebook as a means of launching competitions, advertising and even polls. Febreze was no different. In the April of 2008, Febreze launched a poll on Facebook “Choose A Limited Edition Flavour”, and the idea with the most entries would be produced.

Its instancy (not a word?) speed, and mass viralistic nature made social networking a perfect tool for marketers. But it had a poisonous down side – hackers. And when hackers caught wind of the “Choose A Limited Edition Flavour” campaign, they launched themselves at it.

Creating false account after false account, “Dog Shit” flavour soon became a clear winner. Febreze thought this was just a strange and abstract way of making your furniture smell like an authentic outdoors, and the naive executives never considered that there was foul play involved. It got to the point where the odour had even been created, bottled AND advertised, however when it broke national news and public outrage became apparent, Febreze investigated and realised their mistake.

They pulled it from the market and ceased production immediately. These days bottles of the stuff can be seen being sold for literally hundreds of pounds on eBay – some say that it is an incredibly potent and arousing aid to animal scat fetishists, others merely state “Its something a bit different, and turns a boring old sofa into a boring old sofa that smells of dog shit”.

We here at BJ will try to obtain a bottle for a future competition.