The Coca-Cola company today pulled an internet promotion campaign, after parents accused it of targeting children by using references to a notorious pornographic movie.

The company had been running a promotion for its Dr Pepper brand, in which users allowed their Facebook status box to be taken over by the company.

As part of the promotion, supposedly embarrassing messages would be posted under the user's name, which could be seen by friends entitled to view their Facebook profile.

But the promotion backfired when a parent protested after finding her 14-year-old daughter had been sent a message that made direct reference to a hardcore pornographic film, which has an underground following.

The film the message referred to is particularly controversial because of practices it depicts. One parent, a Mrs Rickman, voiced her concerns on the social networking site Mumsnet.

She was offered compensation of theatre tickets for a West End show and a night in a London hotel.

"Fat lot of use to me, we live in Glasgow," she said.

Today, Coca-Cola apologised and announced an investigation into its promotion procedures.

It said the offending line had been approved by them, without them realising its true meaning.

Other examples of embarrassing statuses used as part of the promotion included: "Lost my special blankie. How will I go sleepies?", "What's wrong with peeing in the shower?" and "Never heard of it described as cute before."

A spokesman said: "It has been brought to our attention that the Dr Pepper promotion on Facebook posted an offensive status update. We apologise for any offence caused."

"As soon as we became aware of this, we took immediate action and removed the status update from the application. We have also taken the decision to end the promotion. We will take all steps necessary to ensure this does not happen again".

While Mrs Rickman was being hailed as a hero on Mumsnet, bemused users on the Dr Pepper Facebook page, which had more than 160,000 people signed up to it, bemoaned the abrupt ending of the competition.

Other users complained that the promised cash prize for successful participants had been harder to win than anticipated.

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0 # Bart Jawien 2010-07-19 09:24

I signed up for this and little did I know (didn't read the fine print) that the prize was valid for UK residence only but I really thought the status takeover worked rather well given the bad humor updates by Dr Pepper had my FB friends clearly engaged. Furthermore, FB privacy laws had changed at the same time which totally deemed the campaign 100% redundant ....

Now they've got themselves into a whole new can of worms...

Who's to blame here; a) poor digital planning and strategy, b) Facebook privacy laws, c) Facebook allowing kids to register d) all the above?

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