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New Balance is under (or on) fire — literally.
Following the election last week, the athletic footwear and apparel brand became one of the first international companies to congratulate President-elect Donald Trump, it appears mainly because of what his proposed policies could mean for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Matt LeBretton, the vice president of public affairs at New Balance tweeted, “The Obama admin turned a deaf ear to us & frankly w/ Pres-Elect Trump we feel things are going to move in the right direction.”
Days later, the white supremacist site The Daily Stormer, published an article calling New Balance the “official shoes of white people” and the “official brand of the Trump Revolution.”
In response, some people on social media are showing their disdain for the brand’s endorsement by defacing their New Balance sneakers on social media, or tossing them in the trash.
Speedo and Ralph Lauren have ended relationships with U.S. Olympian Ryan Lochte, a decision that comes after the swimmer was accused of fabricating his tale of being robbed in Rio de Janeiro.
"Speedo USA today announces the decision to end its sponsorship of Ryan Lochte," the brand announced in a statement. "As part of this decision, Speedo USA will donate a $50,000 portion of Lochte's fee to Save the Children, a global charity partner of Speedo USA's parent company, for children in Brazil."
As for Ralph Lauren, the company said its endorsement agreement with Lochte "was specifically in support of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games and the company will not be renewing his contract." ...
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....
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....
Chipotle was the latest brand to engage in a “fake Twitter hack” marketing stunt, following in the footsteps of MTV and BET a few months ago. The intention behind these stunts is to clearly boost fans and followers for their brands, but, unfortunately, exposes a major flaw in how brand see their customers and how their perception of social is flawed. Furthermore, these types of theatrics deter from the game-change possibilities of how brands and customers can build mutually beneficial and long lasting relationships through these platforms...
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.
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....
The hipster dud makers and serial perverts who run American Apparel are no strangers to controversy and bad PR–the company’s former rep recently published a cute book titled “Trust Me, I’m Lying”, and his thesis seems to be that bloggers, reporters and other media personalities are just as dishonest as he is. The company made another dubious promotional decision yesterday by advertising a 20% off “Hurricane Sandy Sale” for email subscribers living in areas affected by the storm. The message encouraged customers to stop by local branches “in case you’re bored” so they can save a couple of bucks on cheap, LA-made t-shirts guaranteed to fray at the seams within six months. This characteristically insensitive email blast inspired a stream of outrage on Twitter, with many users promising to boycott the chain and its silver leggings once and for all. [More stupid, insensitive marketing generates predictable bad PR ~ Jeff]
Less than one week after a Pizza Hut PR campaign tried to bribe attendees at the Town hall presidential debate to ask the candidates what they put on their pizza, Pizza Hut has changed its tune. Does Pizza Hut have sausage — or pepperoni — on its face? Less than one week ago, the pizza chain was on a presidential PR high. It created a stunt to convince attendees at Tuesday's Town Hall presidential debate at Hofstra University, to ask President Obama and Mitt Romney if they preferred sausage or pepperoni on their pizza. Anyone who simply posed the question was guaranteed free pizza for life. That's a free pizza a week for up to 30 years. But Pizza Hut has changed its tune following a spurt of negative PR on blogs and in the media. "Some of the attention we received was not positive," concedes Kurt Kane, chief marketing officer. "So, we decided the question was better served online than in the debate itself."Oops. Pizza Hut is hardly the first to have a PR stunt go awry. Nor will it be the last. BMW had to apologize earlier this year after a PR offer to pay for the naming rights to a weather system backfired when the system turned into the deep freeze that claimed lives across Europe. And when rapper MGK performed at a Microsoft store in Orlando, earlier this month, store employees had to urge him to stop when he began destroying laptops as he performed.... [Humble pie, er pizza was needed ~ Jeff]
Toshiba's latest ad campaign portrays medical test subjects as freaks, an approach that puzzled the Association of Clinical Research Organizations. Although most consumers know Toshiba as an electronics company, part of its business in the U.S. is the manufacturing of diagnostic and medical imagining equipment. In fact, Toshiba American Medical Systems is looking for young people—ages 6 months to 18 years of age—to participate in a study to improve the MRI experience, according to ClinicalTrials.gov. Yet a Toshiba ad campaign for its Satellite Ultrabook computer portrays people who take part in clinical trials as freaks. A young man—only slightly older than the people Toshiba Medical Systems seeks for its MRI study—is cast as a “professional medical test subject.” During the 30-second commercial, he is subjected to bizarre experiments that turn him into a purple-faced monster. At one point he refers to the subjects of clinical trials as “test monkeys.”... [A lame ad that won't sell many computers and as a benefit offended an influential group of scientists. Dearth of real creative these days IMHO - JD]
How much more do you want to hear about the U.S. Secret Service sex scandal in Cartagena, Colombia? While American media continues to obsess over the gory details behind a night of too much ‘fun,’ a parallel story of outrage and marketing non-sense has emerged causing Spirit Airlines to shut down its campaign ‘Get More Bang for your Buck.’ Leveraging the hype and attention over the news in Cartagena, the ‘cheap’ airline -figuratively and literally speaking- took opportunistic advantage of the news to create a banner ad and promotion implying sex tourism to Cartagena, Colombia. While this is not the first time Spirit Airlines uses racy advertising to lure its customers, this time around the collateral damage of poor insights, targeting and messaging may result in a big hit to the bottom line by upsetting Latinos at large....
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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. ...
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....
And your massive brand Twitter fail of the day goes to … Dave & Buster's!
To advertise its Taco Tuesday, the restaurant chain made a joke that pretty clearly went over the line, prompting incredulity from its Twitter followers. "I hate tacos, said no Juan ever," the tweet read.
Obviously, this isn't the first time a brand has tweeted out something outrageous—in this case, racist. But the question remains: How does this kind of stuff make it into the actual world?...
From purple ketchup to baby food for adults, these brand extensions were nothing short of miserable failures.
Brand extensions, or when a company rolls out a new product that’s still connected to their core brand, are a mainstay of the food product industry. Most are well-thought-out, field tested, and happen to make a lot of sense: Oscar Mayer’s known for its lunch meat, so why not buy little rounds of their turkey, with cheese, crackers, a drink, and dessert, all packaged up in a tidy box? Lunchables were a hit when they were rolled out in 1988 for that very reason: it made sense, and parents trusted that the brand would be able to provide a decent, complete lunch for their kid.
However, while the brand extensions we’ll be taking a look at today might have made sense to some exhausted brand development executive somewhere, they certainly weren't hits with the general public....
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....
Although social media has been around for a few years, plenty of businesses and entrepreneurs still get it wrong. When planning your social marketing strategy and being active on social channels, avoid these 5 common content mistakes....
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]
Newsjacking is the (sometimes) clever, quick-response PR tactic piggybacking on current events with an angle benefiting you or your client’s company. The strategy is not new by any means, but became increasingly popular over the last several years with the rise of Twitter and the constant struggle to stay relevant and timely as news stories can be buried within minutes. Marketing strategist David Meerman Scott’s definition of newsjacking is the “process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business.” To execute newjacking appropriately you must stay abreast of breaking news stories, know your target audience and most importantly, utilize common sense. As a result you can increase search rankings and exposure to new customers or clients. Failing to heed these rules results in you: 1) completely falling on your face in a desperate attempt to promote a hardly-relevant spin on a topic and 2) most likely pissing-off a social community of very vocal citizens. In the wake of the devastating Hurricane Sandy, I felt the need to bring up the most sensitive and more-often-than-not inappropriate newsjacking, which occurs during a tragedy.... [Stupid marketing and PR is as stupid marketing/PR does with predictable bad PR and poor results. ~ Jeff]
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]
Fisker, a luxury car manufacturer hopes the answer is yes. On June 22, Fisker ran several ads in The Wall Street Journal. The ads come after several recalls and embarrassing reviews of its only car on the market, the Karma, a luxury hybrid sports sedan. Since its founding in 2007, Fisker has recalled almost 260 Karmas, while another broke down during testing by Consumer Reports. The incident triggered many complaints from other Karma drivers. Fisker also drew some bad press for accepting a loan from the federal government that sparked comparisons to the bankrupt Solyndra. However, Fisker’s advertising team that consists of two agencies said these ads will introduce the car and offer a “sneak peak of the brand voice” and are not related to the negative attention the car maker has received recently....
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Politics and marketing always make a potentially toxic soup. Witness the Twitter response to New Balance's endorsement of Trump.