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Olympian Ryan Lochte, who was dropped this week by major sponsors including Speedo and Ralph Lauren, has found a brand willing to take him on. Pine Bros. Softish Throat Drops signed an endorsement deal today with Lochte, who will appear in commercial and print ads for the brand. The swimmer thanked the company in a tweet today. Lochte embellished the story of what he claimed was a robbery at gunpoint with fellow swimmers at a gas station in Rio de Janeiro during the Olympics earlier this month, lying about it to NBC's Billy Bush and Matt Lauer (and inspiring some shade from the likes of Al Roker, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, who all called him out for his behavior). Lochte apologized to Lauer in an interview that aired on the Today Show on Monday, saying that he "over-exaggerated" the events of that night. Lochte's ads for Pine Bros. will feature the tagline, "Pine Brothers Softish Throat Drops: Forgiving On Your Throat," just as the company—and Lochte, himself —is asking the public to forgive him. ...
Major conglomerates claim their food is healthy. But they might have funded the study -- and the feds barely care
...Within the food industry and among nutrition experts, the code phrase for all of these types of foods marketed with nutrient-content and health-related claims is functional foods, foods they claim can target and enhance particular bodily functions and overall health. The functional foods term is, however, so poorly and broadly defined that virtually any food with added nutrients, or carrying some type of health claim, seems to qualify. Through their ability to overwhelm consumers with nutritional and health claims on food packaging and in advertisements, food corporations have become the primary disseminators of the most simplified and reductive understanding of food and nutrients in the present era of functional nutritionism....
Exhibitionist businessman Richard Branson has flashed his underwear for his latest brazen publicity stunt as he expands his airline business into Scotland, saying he was 'enjoying wearing a kilt' despite the weather. He is as famous for his brazen publicity stunts as he is for his multi-million pound business empire.
But yesterday, Virgin Atlantic President Richard Branson performed what may have been his most tawdry exploit yet, as he promoted his company’s expansion into Scotland.
Stepping off the first Virgin plane at Edinburgh airport from Heathrow, the billionaire businessman lifted up his kilt to the watching crowd to reveal pants bearing the slogan ‘stiff competition.’...
Many companies large and small have attempted PR stunts and there are some great examples of successful events large and small that have worked out for the sponsoring company: think Red Bull’s Stratos Mission, with it’s daredevil leap from the edge of space, or Kentucky Fried Chicken’s giant logo in the Nevada desert, or even the granddaddy of them all, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. These efforts and others like them garnered tons of free press coverage for their sponsors, generated millions of impressions, and ultimately led to increased awareness and sales. But for every successful PR stunt that is launched by a wide-eyed marketing team, there are dozens of unsuccessful efforts littering the road. Even though the old saw, “there is no bad PR” is still widely subscribed to, real damage can be done when an attempt at a PR stunt fails, in truth the damage done to a sponsoring company’s reputation can be immense (not to mention the expense). Here are 5 legendary examples of PR efforts gone horribly, terrible, awfully wrong. #fail has never had better friends than these!....
...Thanks to a tipster with a guilty conscience and some investigative journalism on behalf of The Today Show‘s Moms blog, we now know that the woman named as the winner of the $5,000 contest is a professional actress–and she’s not even pregnant. A “struggling single mom” named Natasha Hill supposedly won after submitting an essay about why she should be the one to let the wi-fi equipped public name her baby and claim the $5,000 prize. If the name turned out to be something lame like Aiden or Facebook? “There’s always a nickname.” But there was no contest. There were no contestants. There was no baby. This was a kindergarten-level PR stunt designed to gain media attention–and it did. Dozens of media outlets including Saturday Night Live mentioned it....
Pizza Hut’s Cheesy ‘Lifetime Supply’ PR Stunt... As PR experts we’re concerned about Pizza Hut’s latest publicity stunt, which offers a lifetime of free pizza to any attendee at the town hall debate—to be held at Hofstra University—who asks if the candidates prefer pepperoni or sausage on their pie. If you have a loved one in Iraq or Afghanistan, or an unemployed family member, or if you just happen to care about fellow citizens that you don’t even know for some reason, the humor of this ill-conceived idea may be lost on you. There is a difference between tailoring your marketing efforts to fit the political season and plotting to interrupt the process by exploiting democracy in action. America, and the rest of the world, doesn’t need the precious minutes of an important debate crassly interrupted by Pizza Hut’s strategy to sell more pizza. It’s absurd, insulting and embarrassing. It’s tone deaf to what the public is saying, thinking and feeling.... [My view is sometimes marketing drools! Silly, inane and not effective. Large pan fail! ~ Jeff]
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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....
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.
When we hear the words “deceptive marketing”, we generally think of campaigns that promote the blatantly false or grossly exaggerated “benefits” of a product (i.e. the butt-sculpting superpower of Sketchers Shape Ups or the death-cheating health claims of POM juice). In cases like these, the offending parties are held accountable by the FTC for intentionally misleading consumers. The public doesn’t like being lied to, and we rely on governing bodies and uniform regulations to protect us. But what about the marketing we encounter every time we visit a grocery store? In our increasingly health-conscious society, more and more people are checking labels to make sure they are feeding their families the most nutritious, least harmful foods possible. But what many don’t realize is that labels reading “all natural” or “farm fresh” don’t necessarily mean what people think they mean; in fact, due to a lack of regulation, many such buzz words mean virtually nothing at all....
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....
In face of disaster, where should you draw the line between an opportunistic sales push and complete silence? “Sandy Sale”, “This Storm Blows (but Free Shipping doesn’t)”, “Franken Storm Franken Sale” and “Every Cloud has a Silver Lining” were amongst the slogans used by businesses during the disaster – leaving many New Yorkers gobsmacked and outraged by the insensitivity. Superstorm Sandy hit New York almost two weeks ago, taking over the East Coast of America and leaving it in turmoil. Sparking 20 million tweets, and an estimated 1.3 million Instagram photos, Hurricane Sandy is one of the most talked about topics on social networks to date. With New York slowly getting back on its feet and recovering from the disaster, we take a look at how retailers and businesses reacted online during the largest Atlantic hurricane and investigate how sales and marketing should be managed times of tragedy. Just because something’s made the social news, should you join in?... [Quick review and analysis of marketer missteps during hurricane Sandy ~ Jeff]
How important are consumer-generated reviews in your purchase-making decisions? If you're like me, the answer is VERY. When assessing hotels, the write-ups on Virtual Tourist and Trip Advisor invariably make or break my booking. The reviews on Yelp play the deciding role in tipping the restaurant scales. Same with Fandango for movie reviews. Then there's the granddaddy of them all, Amazon, which recognized the intrinsic value of its customers' reviews early on in the game. It even applied for and was granted a patent. As I think about it, nearly all of the big-branded retail websites today allow customers to weigh in -- good, bad and ugly.... [Excellent post by Peter Himler - JD]
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Disgraced Olympian Ryan Lochte, who was dropped this week by major sponsors including Speedo and Ralph Lauren, has found a brand willing to take him on. Pine Bros.