How to safely (not) eat Tide Pods.

2012 ; Tide Pods released to the general public.

Mid 2017 ; College Humor makes video talking about eating Tide Pods.

Late 2017 ; Mainstream Twitter dicusses eating Tide Pods.

January 7th 2018 ; TheAaronSwan669 makes first Tide Pod Challenge video on YouTube.

January & February ; Tide Pod Challenge becomes an actual thing?

Yes, Tide Pods look like candy. No, that does not mean you can eat them. Sheesh.

In early 2018, this is something that people seemed to struggle to undersand, for some reason. When Tide Pods came out in 2012, American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) was scared that YOUNG children would accidently consume the pods because they don’t understand what to eat and what not to eat. However, it never crossed P&G’s mind that in 2018, they would have to deal with able minded people, who actually wanted to consume Tide Pods even though it could kill them.

The idea of maybe “eating” Tide Pods came from the fear of parents. They were scared that their SMALL children would accidentally eat a pod. So it was muttered around PTAs but never really taken seriously. But then in 2015, Dylan DelMonico wrote an article,“ So Help Me God, I’m Going To Eat One Of Those Multicolored Detergent Pods” that made people think it might be ok/funny to eat a pod. And that is when the fear became actual conversations amongst people. In mid 2017, College Humor released their video, which started a shit storm on the internet.

And then Twitter happened in late 2017…….

In the first 15 days of 2018, AAPCC had reported 39 cases of teenagers (13–19) who had eaten Tide Pods of their own volition. In 2016, they had 39 cases total. This was concerning.

And that is how “The Tide Pod Challenge” became an official thing on the internet. Youtube and Twitter were bombarded with videos of teenagers eating Tide Pods because they wanted to seem cool. It had gone too far.

Tide and P&G stepped in and officially said in a statement that, “Nothing is more important to us than the safety of people who use our products. We are deeply concerned about the intentional and improper use of liquid laundry packs by young people engaging in intentional self-harm challenges.”

The way that P&G dealt with this “marketing crisis” was to lauch their own ad campaign, starring Rob Gronkowski, from the New England Patriots, in a video released on Twitter.

P&G also worked with various social media platforms to make sure that nearly every video that had a child eating a Tide Pod was taken down. Stores that sold Tide Pods (so every store), took their own precautions, for example Walgreens locked up their Tide Pods and you had to show ID to buy them.

The Tide Pod Challenge was a “great” way to start 2018, definitely showcasing how “intellectual” we are as a species. However, it did show how intellectual P&G was as a company. They understood that in order for the challenge to die on the internet, they needed to be relatively quiet on the issue, and just make sure that people were aware that Tide Pods SHOULD NOT be eaten. If anything this catastrophe was actually unintentionaly marketing genius; P&G’s stock went, people were buying their product, it was being talked about in the news. And people weren’t blaming Tide for the incident because they had already warned their customers that Tide Pods were NOT to be eaten. The Tide Pod Challenge was the fault of the human brain and our “curiousity” about new things. But, hey, it gave Tide some great marketing.