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It's a tragic day, as one of the most gifted musicians of the modern era has passed. Despite his moniker, Prince, who died Thursday at 57, was a king among men and will live on only through memory and the hours of powerful and provocative music he left behind. Brands, as they usually do, tried to join the conversation about Prince online with mostly-purple-clad homages. That's challenging in the best of times—and doubly hard when the conversation is mostly one giant outpouring of grief. Not every brand managed it well. As of this writing, at least two brands have had second thoughts about their posts and deleted them outright. Many others remain up, though some are clearly in questionable taste—mostly because they feel overly self-promotional....
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....
Cause based marketing is the biggest trend in the industry. The influence of Millennials is growing and attention spans are shortening, and leveraging socially positive causes has become one of the key methods for brands to be seen as benevolent, hip and relevant.
However, it’s not as simple as attaching a dollar figure to a cause, and it doesn’t matter if you wrap a bad campaign in a good cause, it’s still a bad campaign, which in the end will be more damaging to your brand. With this in mind, here are some of the best and worst examples of recent cause-based campaigns, as well as some key insights on what to do and what to avoid....
Sometimes the smartest brands use content marketing in a remarkably dangerous and stupid way. Case in point: Coca Cola's recent sneaky gambit, employing nutritionist bloggers to sell the iconic soft drink as a heart-smart snack.
Last month, nutritionists paid by the beverage mega-giant were touting mini-cans of Coke as a healthy snack option in online columns, radio commentary and print. Making the whole thing particularly odious, this paid content was insinuated into stories about February's Heart Health and Black History Month.
Without shame, the world's largest beverage company has admitted to paying to push mini-cans of Coke as a part of a healthy diet, arguing the marketing ploy is simply a version of “product placement.” A Coca-Cola spokesman told the Associated Press that the semi-stealth effort was what virtually all brands do to shine a positive light on their respective products....
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....
It can't all be perfect: the worst of content marketing in 2014 stuck to old frameworks at best, and furthered harmful stereotypes or outright offended at worst. It was a particularly rough year for some pretty major brands, especially on the social media front.
Luckily, their snafus can teach us all a little something about what to do better next year. So, as you're reading through our list of the worst of 2014, make some mental notes on what 2015 will look like.Without further ado....
JOY—the fashion chain that has 26 locations throughout the UK—is the latest brand to create unnecessary controversy by tweeting something stupid.
The trouble started yesterday when a customer complained via Twitter about a greeting card that the store has for sale.
At first glance, I didn’t find this card offensive. But that’s the thing about offense: I don’t get to decide what’s sincerely offensive to other people; they do.
And if a customer makes their sincere objection to this greeting card known to JOY, the company—at the very least—should know better than to antagonize the person who complained.Instead, JOY said this....
The 50th anniversary publication of Roald Dahl's children's classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is leaving a bad taste in some mouths. Controversy surrounds the cover of the Penguin Modern Classics edition, which eschews Willy Wonka's fanciful factory, golden tickets, Oompa-Loompas and other familiar story elements. Instead, we get a stylized image of a young girl, quaffed to the hilt in colorful bows and silks, sitting in her mother's lap.
Detractors are denouncing the shot for sexualizing kids, and they deride its sleazy '60s vibe as inappropriate for a story geared toward young people. They have a valid point, though in fairness, the broader meaning of the image is open to all sorts of interpretations. (It's not overtly sexual. I mean, we don't see Wonka's willy, thank goodness.)...
The first half of 2014 is already in the books, and it looks like a lot of marketers and companies didn’t learn anything from last year about social media. Many brands still made a number of bad judgments and stumbled when it came to handling their social profiles, which led to backlash and a tarnished image for some.
Mistakes can happen anytime, and with half the year already over, now is a great time to discuss some of 2014’s biggest marketing and social media blunders so far. With five full months ahead, this should serve as a great lesson for all individuals, brands, and companies trying to market themselves to the public.
Here are some things to keep in mind: - It’s easy to post things on social media, especially on Facebook and Twitter. Remember, though, that backlash can come just as swiftly and easily. Sure, people make mistakes from time to time, but with all the previous instances, everyone should know by now how not to act in public, especially if you’re representing a brand known the world over....
...As Kiera Butler noted on Mother Jones, Chick-fil-A—whose chicken sandwich is stuffed with 27 grams of fat, 1750 milligrams of sodium, and an ingredients list almost as long as the Declaration of Independence — is an odd fit to launch a wellness site.
It’s clearly an effort to change the image of a brand that’s currently recognized nearly as much for its stance against gay marriage than for its fast food, but in doing so, Chick-fil-A is dismissing two of the cardinal rules of content creation: don’t trick your consumers, and don’t piss them off.
Healbe finished up its Indiegogo scampaign for its miracle, calorie-counting wristband on April 15 with promises to ship in June. As we have reported previously, even if the product was suddenly scientifically possible (which it isn’t), that was a really tough deadline to meet. For one thing, manufacturing a complicated electronic product in two months would be unheard of and, for another, when photos of its prototype leaked online, hardware experts who we showed them to commented that it looked rough and primitive.
Well, after Healbe had teased that it would be releasing its June delivery schedule this week… it turns out we were right....
...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:
Note to self: Never mention a celebrity on Twitter from a company account. Recently, it hasn't worked out well for two different brands.
A few weeks ago, people were in an uproar over Red Sox slugger Big Papi's selfie with the President. Then, last week, Katherine Heigl issued a lawsuit to Duane Reade for posting a paparazzi photo of her on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Here's what they posted on Twitter (Facebook's post was almost identical)...
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Burger King took out a full-page, open-letter-style ad in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune this morning, calling for a truce with McDonald's and suggesting they join forces to create a "McWhopper" burger.
But McDonald's is having none of it.Burger King's idea was to "get the world talking" about the Peace One Day charity, which is lobbying for September 21 to become an official Peace Day. Fernando Machado, the fast-food chain's senior vice president for global brand management, said it wasn't just a PR stunt and that BK was hoping McDonald's would agree to sell the hybrid burger September 21....
Your target audience is sick and tired of interruptive ads. They want something more valuable, rich and actionable. The content has to be digestible information, whether it’s presented in the form of an article, a blog post, an infographic, video, memes, podcasts, or short reports.
If you run a blog, your customers are most likely your readers. And if you’re an information marketer, your customer is someone who interacts with you in a certain way, in order to buy your product or service....
Starbucks’ heart may have been in the right place, but its brain was on vacation. That seems to be the general sentiment on social media a week after the coffee juggernaut’s controversial “Race Together” program, in which barristas encouraged customers to engage them about race relations, widely regarded as the “third rail” of American culture, society, and politics.
That’s according to a social media postmortem (and I use the term advisedly) conducted by Networked Insights, which tracked the volume and tenor of social media discussion about “Race Together.” As Networked Insights Vice President of Customer Insights Rick Miller put it when I tried to be nice about it and characterized the response as “mixed”: “The response was not even mixed, the response was just bad. I’ve actually never seen such an overwhelmingly negative response to a PR effort like this.”...
U.K.-based trade body called for advertising agencies to strike against Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, citing “despicable” practices it says the Budweiser maker imposed on its members when pitching for work.In a recent pitch for work,
AB InBev asked agencies how low they would go on rates, how many free hours of work they’d offer and whether they’d wait for payment beyond the current 120-day period, the Marketing Agencies Association said Thursday in an e-mailed statement.
The world’s biggest brewer also asked agencies how much money they’d give back -- known as rebates -- beyond a minimum 5 percent the company already stipulates, to contribute to its corporate sustainability program, the MAA said. The organization called on agencies that work with AB InBev to strike starting April 7....
Last week, Coca-Cola suspended its Super Bowl-timed, automated social campaign #MakeItHappy, when Gawker tricked the brand into tweeting out a number of lines from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” In the campaign, Coke asked people to respond to negative tweets with positive ones — using an ASCII code to convert their tweets into images like singing cats and sunglass-wearing palm trees.
But while the soda giant may have been left as red-faced as its signature cans after this debacle, it’s not the first time the use of automated replies on Twitter has backfired on a brand.
Here’s a look at some of the biggest recent brand fails in automation on Twitter...
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....
Filed under: The most WTF thing we've seen in months.
Urban Outfitters, purveyor of clothing and home goods, big-ass floppy hats and occasionally offensive T-shirts, has outdone itself with this product on its website—a "vintage" Kent State University sweatshirt featuring fake blood splatters.
In 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired on a group of unarmed anti-war student protesters at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine others. The sweatshirt sold out quickly, because there was only one. ("We only have one, so get it or regret it!" said the description.) Now it's listed on eBay by someone who says he/she will "give 50% of the profit to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who protect those who cannot protect themselves, often those who are victims of police brutality."...
Earlier today, Paramount Pictures Australia tweeted a poster which features the Ninja Turtles jumping from an exploding building. No problem, right? How about if the release date for the film in Australia is September 11th? Still not a problem, you say?
How about if the poster that was tweeted has the Ninja Turtles jumping from a New York City building that’s exploding with "SEPTEMBER 11" in bold lettering at the bottom? And Leonardo has a NYC pin in blue and white just so you’re extra-aware that you’re in New York City?...
The great thing about social media is that it allows whatever stupid thing you want to say to reach your audience instantly. The terrible thing about social media is that it allows whatever stupid thing you want to say to reach your audience instantly. It takes about 30 seconds of thought to accurately gauge whether your brilliant marketing gimmick will build brand engagement or be prosecuted as some kind of hate crime in certain countries in Europe.
The folks on this list did not take those 30 seconds......
Businesses and celebrities are supposed to be professional, so why are there constantly mistakes being made, sometimes by even the largest of companies? Well, the answer is because there’s a human behind those Facebook post and endless tweets.
From bad grammar to getting visibly frustrated and engaging in flame wars, there are lessons to be learned from the social media faux pas of others....
It seems that no matter how good you think you are at cleaning, you’re just not up to scratch – missing those vital nooks and crannies where all manner of everyday dirt might hide and fester. If only there were a solution to your squalor! A spokesman for ContractCleaning.co.uk, who polled their employees, said: ‘We appear to be a nation of clumsy people, and not only that we’re lazy as well, with many people admitting they’ve never once cleaned behind the fridge.
Given that this story was created and pushed into the news by a professional cleaning company, it’s little surprise that the results condemned our cleanliness so. That said, there’s a silver lining here: ContractCleaning.co.uk created this story by polling its employees… therefore, what we’ve really discovered, if this story is true (usual caveats apply, there), is that people who hire professional cleaners to clean their homes are utterly filthy.
A global ad agency has sparked outrage with its mattress firm cartoon promo showing Pakistani teen Malala Yousafzai being shot in the head.
Ogilvy & Mather is catching serious heat for the sick illustration for Indian bedding firm Kurl-On that sees the young schoolgirl "bouncing back" from being hit by a Taliban gunman.
In the advert Malala is shot in the face, falls backwards covered in blood and is treated in hospital.
But then, after bouncing off the mattress, she receives an award wearing her trademark pink and gold hijab....
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Another icon has left us and brands prove once again that self-promotion gets in the way of real feeling and sincerity and generates well-deserved scorn. These are loud marketing fails and they should be signed up for sensitivity training.