 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
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....
Cannes Lions 2016 has its first truly cringeworthy moment, in the form of a party invitation seeking "attractive females and models only." The email went out to a number of festival participants who planned to attend The Wednesday Party, an event sponsored by digital agency VaynerMedia and media company Thrillist Media Group with a musical performance by Wyclef Jean. UPDATE: Thrillist founder and CEO Ben Lerer responded to the controversy via an internal staff email that appears in part at the bottom of this story. A female agency executive tells Adweek that she and two female colleagues received the email while having lunch in Cannes on Tuesday. One of them forwarded it to women's advocate and agency veteran Cindy Gallop, who subsequently shared it on Twitter and wrote, "It's 2016, @vaynermedia @thrillist. This is not how you party at @cannes_lions." The email was sent by events company iGetIn. Its key section reads (emphasis via the sender of the message): "Thank you for your interest in attending!! Please be aware that this specific list is for attractive females and models only." The note, which was also shared by members of the public Facebook group Cannes for Cannesseurs, then instructs male attendees to "contact the PR departments of the respective sponsors" if they want to get into the party. It requests that women interested in attending send "recent untouched photos and/or your Instagram/Facebook links for you and each of your additional female guest [sic]," adding, "once we have reviewed we will send you specific entry details." ...
Is Todd Gurley actually vegetarian? You have to wonder after watching this Carl's Jr. commercial starring the Los Angeles Rams running back. The spot shows Gurley supposedly biting into the California Classic Double Cheeseburger, but it's blatantly obvious that the burger isn't real—it's a digitally inserted photo that isn't fooling anyone.
Check out the YouTube comments—almost every one is mocking. "That CGI burger is as inflated as your prices," says one. Says another: "Feel free to send me some burgers at my email. Thank you. Also save them in photoshop so I can eat them at a higher res! Thanks!"
The ad has 92 likes and 700 dislikes on YouTube, as of this writing....
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.”...
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....
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....
When online "experts" share their "expertise," it is always advisable to observe with some skepticism. While the Internet can be considered the modern bastion of knowledge, opinions, and ideas, it is not completely dependable.
In fact, most of what you can find on the web is unreliable information. Take the case of online marketing as an example. Many online marketing "experts" who preach their supposedly effective strategies embarrass themselves by the failure of their ideas in their own practical application.
The following can be considered the worst mistakes in online marketing in 2014. They represent the biggest misconceptions in marketing being peddled by self-proclaimed marketing experts and even by those who have had some real experience in online marketing....
Despite the abundance of social media marketing advice online, lots of businesses still get it wrong.The advice available to anyone trying to solidify their social media marketing strategies is endless. Still, many businesses run into the same pitfalls time and again. An infographic from entrepreneur Jason Squires details the nine most common mistakes.
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....
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?...
|
Ryanair, the Irish low-cost airline, is 24-hour £9.99 flash sale for people who "need a getaway" after the UK voted to leave the European Union. An ad for the promotion on Twitter takes on the famous "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" monkeys and replaces them with UKIP leader Nigel Farage, former London Mayor Boris Johnson, and justice secretary Michael Gove - the leading three figures of the Leave campaign. Ryanair, was firmly in the Remain camp - so much so that it had sent out a marketing email earlier on Friday morning - hours ahead of the official referendum results - to promote the sale, reading: "Celebrate remaining in Europe with 1 million seats from £9.99."...
Cannes Lions has its second cringeworthy moment, this time from a Bronze Lion winner. The outdoor ad, for Bayer from AlmapBBDO in Sao Paulo, reads "Don't worry babe, I'm not filming this.mov" and features aspirin boxes. Cindy Gallop, the former agency exec and vocal women's advocate, has again brought attention to Cannes Lions ceremony tweeting a photo of the ad and commenting, "Don't use this to sell aspirin, male-dominated ad industry [and] don't award it, male dominated juries." UPDATE: Bayer has asked the agency to discontinue the campaign....
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....
When used correctly social media sites can be a great place to interact with other small businesses, generate new sales leads and to keep your customers up to date with your latest news and offers. When not used correctly they can become a scary place where you can destroy your online reputation....
Via donhornsby
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...
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....
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....
There’s already an endless supply of LinkedIn B2B marketing best practices advice out there. So I thought I’d look at the worst practices. From over-promoting to lacking focus, here’s four LinkedIn B2B marketing don’ts you’ll definitely want to avoid.
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."...
|
She made an entire nativity scene that she brings out each Christmas. She also obstructed justice. No sympathy despite the ceramics and crabapple jam.