Every now and then, a little fad shows up on the Internet. It lasts a day or two, raises eyebrows around the world, then quickly fades. It happened again, and this time it involved a bunch of online mothers taking offense to an ad by Motrin.

How did it progress?

Not so well for Motrin. As of the writing of this post, this is what I get when I view the Motrin official website:

It’s the mommy fail whale.

All this resulted from an attempt by Motrin to do a viral video online. For those not into online marketing, “going viral” means that you put out a piece of content which gets so much attention that it drives viewers to forward it to all their friends. By nature of people sharing it with others, word quickly spreads – much like a virus.

Motrin put out a web clip where they talked about the pressures of “wearing” babies in slings, carriers, etc. The commercial talks about the pains and headaches one would get while wearing their baby. Here’s the video:

This pissed off mothers everywhere and, soon, the mommy-blogger world and the moms on Twitter rose up in protest of this video. In fact, a search of “motrin” on Twitter search shows a lot of conversation happening. By this morning, for whatever reason, Motrin went offline.

This morning, an apology was issued:

I am the Vice President of Marketing for McNeil Consumer Healthcare. I have responsibility for the Motrin Brand, and am responding to concerns about recent advertising on our website. I am, myself, a mom of 3 daughters. We certainly did not mean to offend moms through our advertising. Instead, we had intended to demonstrate genuine sympathy and appreciation for all that parents do for their babies. We believe deeply that moms know best and we sincerely apologize for disappointing you. Please know that we take your feedback seriously and will take swift action with regard to this ad. We are in process of removing it from our website. It will take longer, unfortunately, for it to be removed from magazine print as it is currently on newstands and in distribution.

I’m not going to comment on whether this ad was offensive or not. I’ll let mom’s decide. But, it does go to show you three things online:

Online mothers are a force to be reckoned with.
Online viral marketing can work for you or very much against you.
In this day and age of social media on the Internet, both #1 and #2 are possible.