Back in February, I wrote about the Centers for Disease Control's misguided attempts to market against videogames and gamers, a campaign titled "Give Your Thumbs a Rest, Play for Real." I first saw the ads in AdCritic and later found the remainder of the series online. Joystiq and others picked up the thread, and we all did a good deal of seemingly well-deserved CDC-bashing.

Well, I just got back from giving a talk on games for health at the CDC here in Atlanta. Before the talk, John Anderton told me that the CDC had nothing to do with this campaign at all (he'd recently left a comment to this effect on the original thread). Apparently someone ripped off the CDC logo and put it on these ads. Weirdly, the ads do seem to trace back to ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, who apprently did run a $125 million PR campaign for the CDC. That was back in 2002, so maybe someone took their lead and ran with it.

I don't have any definitive answers yet, but at the end of the day, the public associates the CDC with these ads, a point I shared with them, even if they weren't reponsible. Still, I can't find definitive evidence, yet, that the CDC wasn't involved. John's point was that the logo and name was incomplete and therefore not official. I'll try to get an official statement from the CDC or Saatchi if I can. As if the rhetoric of online social marketing wasn't bad enough, now we see that we may not even know what's social marketing and what's social marketing commentary.