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New Balance is under (or on) fire — literally.
Following the election last week, the athletic footwear and apparel brand became one of the first international companies to congratulate President-elect Donald Trump, it appears mainly because of what his proposed policies could mean for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Matt LeBretton, the vice president of public affairs at New Balance tweeted, “The Obama admin turned a deaf ear to us & frankly w/ Pres-Elect Trump we feel things are going to move in the right direction.”
Days later, the white supremacist site The Daily Stormer, published an article calling New Balance the “official shoes of white people” and the “official brand of the Trump Revolution.”
In response, some people on social media are showing their disdain for the brand’s endorsement by defacing their New Balance sneakers on social media, or tossing them in the trash.
There are a few universal truths in online dating: most photos are carefully staged, most profiles are slightly puffed-up, and most people on them (and this is clearly fast-changing) are actually human.Until some unlucky Tinder users spotted Ava.
A company promoting the movie Ex Machina created a fake account, Ava, with a photo of the star of the movie. Ava is an AI in the film and presumably she wants to get down. Unsuspecting men and women swiped to make a match and Ava, in a cross between cheesy AI and Eliza, asked a few pertinent questions including “Have you ever been in love?” and “What makes you human?”
Normal users assumed they were talking to a human but they were actually talking to a bot. In the end, like the chatbots that now linger on near dead chat systems like AIM, Ava sent her suitors to an Instagram page where they found out that she was all a sham....
Once again, the Walmart website made a pricing error, and once again shoppers tried to pounce on it only to later have their orders canceled.
And as always happens in these situations, some of these folks are mistakenly claiming that this was a bait-and-switch scam.
This time, the deeply discounted item was a $100 Walmart gift card, which the site somehow listed as only $10.
So of course, people jumped at the chance to purchase these deeply discounted cards.
One woman tells Houston’s ABC13 that she ordered 80 of these cards (total face value: $8,000) for $800....
Why can't movie-streaming sites deliver the selection of movies that customers obviously want? This was the question posed by a recent New York Times column, comparing undersupplied services like Netflix with unauthorized platforms like Popcorn Time.
The answer, the Times explains, is windowing—the industry practice of selling exclusivity periods to certain markets and platforms, with the result of staggered launches. But the Times fails to ask a more fundamental question: why do streaming sites have to listen to Hollywood's windowing demands in the first place?...
From purple ketchup to baby food for adults, these brand extensions were nothing short of miserable failures.
Brand extensions, or when a company rolls out a new product that’s still connected to their core brand, are a mainstay of the food product industry. Most are well-thought-out, field tested, and happen to make a lot of sense: Oscar Mayer’s known for its lunch meat, so why not buy little rounds of their turkey, with cheese, crackers, a drink, and dessert, all packaged up in a tidy box? Lunchables were a hit when they were rolled out in 1988 for that very reason: it made sense, and parents trusted that the brand would be able to provide a decent, complete lunch for their kid.
However, while the brand extensions we’ll be taking a look at today might have made sense to some exhausted brand development executive somewhere, they certainly weren't hits with the general public....
...Stone's corporate identity has always threatened to bleed over the thin line separating satire and self-importance, so maybe it's not the best example of craft beer's direction. TheAtlantic piece drives the point home more pointedly: "So is this the future of U.S. beer consumption – a country that stumbles over itself to buy beer made with wild-carrot seed, bee balm, chanterelle mushrooms , and aged in whiskey barrels?"
It got me thinking. If the craft beer market has become a contest over the most outrageous, has craft beer finally grown up and become its nemesis, mass market beer? Allow me to demonstrate....
I was lucky to start my social media journey when people were still trying to figure things out. It was a quiet place focused on people and relationships … almost to a fault. The pioneers in this space were radically anti-company, anti-advertising, and anti-measurement. I can remember one Chris Brogan rant in particular when he literally yelled at a corporate audience “This is not about your stupid company.”
Today, it is nearly ALL about your stupid company. The social web is like a carnival midway with shrill hucksters barking at you to come over to their stand.
And here is what most people have forgotten — Business has always been built on relationships, not people yelling at you. Social media used to be an extraordinary opportunity to build those relationships. And, it still can be....
Apple's new ads are failing.
Here are the 10 most effective ads of Q2 2013, according to Ace Metrix, a company that measures audience responses to commercials. The No.1 spot was by AT&T, advertising a Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, which can survive being dunked in a fishbowl. Samsung's own ad for the GS4 came in at No.8
Apple wasn't on the list...
While it may seem an oxymoron, the problem with marketing is it's full of marketers. Here's why we need to get back to "real" marketing....
I’m a marketer. In marketing, our mission, if you like, is to instill desire.You may see a product you like, but don’t necessarily need. Marketing’s job is to instill enough desire around that product to make you need, or want, it.While there are several facets to marketing – including the afore-mentioned desire, as well as awareness and promotion – the ultimate goal of any marketing strategy is to increase growth of a brand....
At its simplest, marketing is the hub that holds much of sales, service, PR and more together. And while that’s part of marketing’s biggest strength, it’s also increasingly becoming its biggest weakness....
JWT India created a series of disturbing ads for the FordFigo, one of which shows former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi flashing a peace sign from the front seat of a car that has three curvaceous women tied up and gagged in the trunk. Ford and JWT have both issued an apology. Ford did not approve the ads; the agency was just publishing some speculative renderings to show off its creative chops. JWT India is Ford's agency for the Figo in that country....
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To the public, Jared Fogle was a geekishly charming icon of personal dedication and accomplishment. But few knew the real Jared, a man frequently driven by his sexual obsession with underage girls.
Court documents filed by prosecutors Wednesday—and acknowledged as true by Fogle's attorney—detail years of sordid sexual activities by Fogle, who regularly spent time with prostitutes while traveling for work, in part as Subway's best-known pitchman.
Prosecutors say Fogle had an opportunity to do the right thing in 2011 when he learned his charitable foundation director was secretly filming children to create pornography. Instead, Fogle reportedly encouraged the exploitation, a decision that resulted in 11 other children being victimized, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Debrota....
Great branding is more than a logo. It’s more than a list of acceptable fonts, too, or even some 100-page PDF containing everything from measurements on proper margins to deep verb-subject-adjective explorations on writing the proper "voice." Great branding is really the DNA of product or company, manifested through various media in ways that the public can recognize and understand.
With that in mind, above is a collection of our biggest branding stories of 2014. It’s not just a highlight reel of great branding. You’ll see some of that, of course, but you’ll also see some of the worst branding of 2014, too, along with essays on branding from some of the best names in the business....
Marketers are trained on how to spin…how to write elegantly…how to stay in the brand voice. We’re also trained on how to lie and how to lie well. In all honestly, we lie so well that sometimes we don’t even realize we are doing it. All of the half-truths, omissions, and spins we put on all of our marketing pieces could be what is holding us back from an authentic connection with the exact audience we’re trying so desperately to attract.
You could argue that we’ve become such good liars that we can’t even tell the difference between lies and truth anymore. How did this happen?...
I can't believe this.Yes, advertisers lie. Or at least bend the truth a little. Everybody knows that, right?
WRONG. People expect to get what what they see on the billboard, but what they don’t know is that it’s impossible. I mean seriously, have you ever wondered why a Big Mac looks 1000% percent better on TV than what you get at the 2am drive thru?
A new infographic from Finances Online reveals just how far companies will go to make their products seem more appealing – from replacing actual ice cream with mashed potato for a more solid appearance to using motor oil for honey or syrup.
To show the disparity between common ads and actual products, Finances Daily compared popular food, hotel and fashion brands, revealing how different the ad images can look from actual items.....
Two years ago Savannah Peterson worked as the head of marketing for a design firm in Silicon Valley. She was introduced to a company making a newfangled photo device. The gadget, called Instacube, ...
Instacube launched a Kickstarter campaign in August of 2012 with the promise of a March 2013 ship date. The Internet fell in love with Instacube, and the device raised nearly three times what it sought. Cut to March of 2014 and not one Instacube has been shipped. Today, at a one-on-one interview at South by Southwest, Peterson told her story....
It worked. Peterson was able to wrangle an article by Engadget, and from there the dominoes fell. Instacube was on CNET, Mashable, and TechCrunch. The campaign had intended to raise $250,000. Within the first 24 hours it had secured more than $100,000. By campaign’s end D2M had raked in $621,049.
Then D2M had to build it. This is where things begin to fall apart. The March 2013 deadline came and went and zero devices had been shipped. Backers, understandably, became impatient....
Attaching a star to your brand is something that advertisers have done since the first rock retailer made a cave drawing of Thutronk the Hunter carrying one of his store’s special stones. And yet, science says that people just don’t care, and that it may have a negative impact on your brand.
New research from the folks at ad analytics service Ace Metrix, who released a similar study in 2011, claims to confirm that celebrified ads do not generally perform as well as ads with unknown actors who hope to someday be celebrities...
The results found that ads without celebrities continue to outscore star-studded ads in all seven facets of the Ace scoring system. It’s not a huge difference, with the overall average score for celeb ads virtually the same as regular non-celeb spots. But Ace says this underscores just how little a difference having a celebrity in your ad makes....
Chipotle was the latest brand to engage in a “fake Twitter hack” marketing stunt, following in the footsteps of MTV and BET a few months ago. The intention behind these stunts is to clearly boost fans and followers for their brands, but, unfortunately, exposes a major flaw in how brand see their customers and how their perception of social is flawed. Furthermore, these types of theatrics deter from the game-change possibilities of how brands and customers can build mutually beneficial and long lasting relationships through these platforms...
Fashion company Benetton caved in to pressure from the Vatican and pulled a Photoshopped ad that showed Pope Benedict XVI kissing a leading Islamic imam, the International Business Times reported Thursday.The Vatican responded with furious protests over the image in the company’s Unhate campaign, released Wednesday, which showed the Pope smooching with Egyptian Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayyeb.“This is a grave lack of respect for the Pope,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi fumed.
Computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier has turned his back on the “information wants to free” meme to which he once subscribed, and he thinks advertising as a business model for media is doomed. It’s not just that Craigslist and other Internet businesses have snatched ads away from traditional media, he reckons; it’s that in this digital era, when Google and Facebook increasingly own most of the inventory, not to mention the ad servers and distribution channels, relying on advertising to prop up your media company just doesn’t make sense. youLanier, the guy credited with coming up with the term “virtual reality,” outlines this thesis in his new book “Who Owns the Future?” which examines the effects network technologies have had on our economy. In an interview with Nieman Journalism Lab, Lanier builds on that case, stating flatly that advertising isn’t a viable business plan for media businesses in the long term. He tells the publication...
Fail fast” has become part of the startup vernacular, thanks to Lean Startup and Lean Startup Machine philosophy, pivoting around “pivoting.” In truth, this shouldn’t be a shock to sluggish corporations, who have long practiced the dark arts of direct marketing or at the very minimum, “Test, learn, evolve.” How is it startups can take risks, pivot, fail, and still find success? Why can’t brands do the same? Where’s the disconnect?...
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Politics and marketing always make a potentially toxic soup. Witness the Twitter response to New Balance's endorsement of Trump.