If you follow any commercial radio stations on Facebook, you’ll know that they mostly recycle already popular memes and jokes as well as nauseating celebrity gossip to ensure they’re receiving plenty of social media traffic.
That tactic didn’t go quite as planned for Adelaide’s Nova 919, after they stirred offence and controversy with a joke posted to their official Facebook page which ends with a woman being punched in the face.
“A girl told me how hard it is for her to gain weight. I said it’s hard for me not to. We had a good laugh and then I punched her in the face,” the joke read. Unsurprisingly, the post was soon taken down.
According to The Advertiser, the post was removed after 45 minutes, but not before several followers who failed to see the funny side of the “joke” expressed their outrage on the station’s Facebook page.
Sensing a potential PR disaster on their hands, Nova later issued a response to the controversy, saying that the “post hasn’t been read as it was originally intended” and was in fact “written by a female”.
“The post was written by a female — and the tone was supposed to be two females joking about how hard it is to lose weight but it’s completely missed its mark,” a spokeswoman said.
“The post hasn’t been read as it was originally intended.”“We ran the same post in Brisbane today and it had a great response but it seems like it’s been interpreted differently here in Adelaide. Recognising the potential for misinterpretation and an error in judgment — we’ve deleted the post in both markets.”
Regardless of the intent or the context, it’s not hard to see how Facebook users would’ve been incensed by that particular “joke” coming up in their feed, particularly as Australia’s problem with violence against women gains more attention.
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As Tone Deaf recently reported, Nova along with the rest of the commercial radio sector lost out big time to triple j in the latest radio ratings survey, with triple j coming out as the number one radio station around the country for 25-39-year-olds.
The 25-39-year-old demographic is most prized among advertisers as these are usually post-tertiary, working consumers who are socially active, often first home buyers, and are therefore worth the most money to advertisers.
Ironically, however, triple j is a government-run and commercial-free network, which means advertisers are not able to target their campaigns with the station has the ears of the demographic they most need.
