Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Mylan and its CEO Heather Bresch are under fire. It raised the price of its EpiPen product — an essential protection for people with life threatening allergies — by a factor of five in the last eight years. Mylan’s statement defending itself clarifies what it’s doing — providing rebates — but evades the main issue of why it increased the price in the first place.

Here’s the dialogue between Mylan and the public, in a nutshell:

Public: Why is this thing so hellishly expensive?

Mylan: We’ll help you afford it with coupons and rebates.

Public: Why is this thing so hellishly expensive?

Mylan: We’re on your side. It’s the insurance regulations.

Public: Why is this thing so hellishly expensive???

RtMylan: We even give some away to schools!S

So Mylan’s position is that it won’t explain the massive price increase on a product where it has a monopoly on a generic medication product that millions of people could die without, a product that’s essentially unchanged from past years....

Back in 2004, media and TV personality Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in jail for obstructing a federal securities investigation.

To pass the time during her incarceration, Stewart did what she does best: cooking and crafts.

Speaking at a Daily Mail brunch session at the Cannes Lions advertising festival on Thursday, Stewart said the food inside was around three years past its expiry date.

"That's why I made jam out of the crab apples on the trees," she added.

Aside from making jam, Stewart also turned her hand to ceramics. As a child she'd go to ceramic classes at the weekend, so she quickly signed up to a ceramics class in prison too, at a place called Alderson....

Wittingly or not, major global corporations are helping fund sites that traffic in fake news by advertising on them.

Take, for instance, a story that falsely claimed former President Barack Obama had banned Christmas cards to overseas military personnel. Despite debunking by The Associated Press and other fact-checking outlets, that article lives on at "Fox News The FB Page," which has no connection to the news channel although its bears a replica of its logo.

And until recently, the story was often flanked by ads from big brands such as the insurer Geico, the business-news outlet Financial Times, and the beauty-products maker Revlon.

This situation isn't remotely an isolated case, although major companies generally say they have no intention of bankrolling purveyors of fake news with their ad dollars. Because many of their ads are placed on websites by computer algorithms, it's not always easy for these companies to steer them away from sites they find objectionable....