Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

...It seems that luck is a simple affair – if you don’t get a parking ticket while having sex in your car, you’re one of the lucky ones amongst us. However, if you don’t self-report as ‘lucky’ in an online survey, it’s clearly your own fault:

However, two in five people who say they are unlucky have never done anything superstitious to turn around their luck with 61 per cent of them saying they would happily walk under a ladder.

There may be a very good reason why people considered to be unlucky haven’t gone out of their way to ‘turn their luck around’, namely that that isn’t really a thing. But, far be it to point out such minor details, when the stakes of poor luck are so high:

Unlucky people are also twice as likely to be single and will probably not have any children.

Naturally, the company who paid for this ‘research’ have their own vested axe to grind:

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.

I’ve collected eight recent social media posts by large companies. Most of these updates are from the last month. To try to pick the abjectly stupidest one would not be easy.

...McElligott was a very smart ad man. Today, many of the social media managers at large and important companies are, by contrast, not very smart ad men. To say that they regularly underestimate their customers’ intelligence would be a great understatement. They seem to believe their customers have the brain power of a baked potato.

I’ve collected eight recent social media posts by large companies. Most of these updates are from the last month. To try to pick the abjectly stupidest one would not be easy. You can go ahead and give it a try, though....

Earlier this week, I posted about the Facebook meltdown and trials and tribulations of Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro in Scottsdale. Arizona (Epic Facebook meltdown, PR fail or publicity ploy?).

This un-reality show couldn’t get much stranger. It has more twists, turns and intrigue than a Shakespearean tragedy. Or maybe the Keystone Cops would be more accurate?

The bistro was featured in a raucous season finale episode on Kitchen Nightmares featuring explosive celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay.

It was an entertaining and highly-charged reality TV episode complete with drama, screaming, yelling, heroes and villains....

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....

A note to readers: While most of the PR failures we write about are unfortunate, they are also amusing (on some level). This one, however, cannot be categorized as anything but horrifically insensitive, bordering on cruel.

Relatives of the victims of last summer’s movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado recently received invitations from Cinemark USA to attend the reopening of the same theater at which their loved ones lost their lives. The invitations, which were sent just after the holidays, urged recipients to “reserve [their] tickets” for an evening of remembrance and a movie to follow.

In response, family members sent a strongly-worded letter to Cinemark in which they expressed anger and outrage at the company’s lack of compassion, calling the invitation “disgusting”. They also noted that Cinemark representatives never reached out to offer their condolences; the company even rebuffed requests to meet with family members without lawyers present. The letter admonishes the reopening celebration as a “thinly veiled publicity ploy” and calls for a boycott of the theater....