A message from Hotrodders.com:

As a member or associate of SEMA, the Specialty Equipment Market Association, we thought you'd appreciate a quick update on SEMA's failed "Spank My Monkey/Anti-Christ" marketing promotion. We found your email address on sema.org, most likely in SEMA's public membership directory.

To recap:

1. This past year, our family-oriented hotrodding forums at Hotrodders.com were spammed with a marketing promotion involving SEMA. The promotional material included:

--A photograph of two men wearing thongs imprinted with the slogan "Spank My Monkey": http://spankmymarketer.com/spank-my-monkey.html .

--A video featuring drinking and driving, urinating in the street, and the owner of a well-known hot rod shop declaring himself to be: "The Anti-Christ of the Hot Rod World": http://spankmymarketer.com/video.html .

2. The promotional video featured a SEMA car giveaway, and plugged Coker Tire, the company of a SEMA executive: Joseph "Corky" Coker. Mr. Coker's brother David also appeared in the promotional film, to advance his new company, Newstalgia Wheel. The promotional material was posted on the forums by a marketer connected to Discovery Communications, parent company of The Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel, in association with the hot rod-themed television show Overhaulin'.

3. After we requested an explanation from those involved, Mr. Coker registered on our forums and attempted to publicly defend the promotion. When he failed, a "mystery" user registered on our forums, posted our administrator's personal information, and made veiled threats to his safety. A basic IP address check revealed that the "mystery" user had been posting from the same location as Mr. Coker. When confronted, Mr. Coker contended that he had not personally made the threatening post, but he publicly admitted that Coker Tire had been behind it. However, he refused to offer an apology, instead comparing our online hotrodding community to a pile of feces on his grandfather's farm.

4. SEMA dispatched their public relations firm, Freeman-McCue, who supplied a cold non-response.

5. Discovery quietly pulled related episodes of Overhaulin' off the air.

6. Lacking an apology, we created a new website to parody and reverse the "Spank My Monkey" marketing campaign: http://SpankMyMarketer.com .

7. Discovery Communications deployed a corporate lawyer to push for the takedown of controversial material on SpankMyMarketer.com.

8. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the net's leading free speech organization, backed us with pro-bono legal representation.

9. The press got a hold of the story: http://spankmymarketer.com/media.html .


Anyway, we're pleased to announce what we hope is the final chapter in this thong-clad debacle:

10. Discovery Communications has backed down from their baseless legal claims against us! 

Their attempt to silence us has failed -- our free speech remains intact, and SpankMyMarketer.com remains online, indefinitely.


We wanted to say thanks to those SEMA member companies who took the time to communicate with us regarding this guerrilla marketing promotion on our forums. Fortunately, most of the companies with whom we spoke seemed genuinely unaware of the situation, and quite displeased to discover that such tactics were being used to promote their related business interests.

Between the media outlets, websites, and blogs that covered the failed "Spank My Monkey" promotion, it earned a permanent place in Internet history. We even found SpankMyMarketer.com being studied in a Harvard Law School class: http://spankmymarketer.com/media.html .

SEMA and Discovery's unethical marketing tactics came as quite a surprise to the members of our online community; their apparent deficit in web-savvy leaves many questions unanswered. Unfortunately, as of today, the 1-year anniversary of the initial "Spank My Monkey/Anti-Christ" promotion, we have yet to receive an apology from Mr. Coker, SEMA, or Discovery Communications.

Nevertheless, we remain hopeful that this incident is a harbinger of change in the way that the less scrupulous elements of the industry relate to enthusiasts, and that most of us share common ground in the belief that, in hotrodding, there is one thing that's just as important as hot rods: hotrodders.

Hotrodders.com