While I’d prefer to come up with these on my own, I’m afraid that I would be the one who’s hard of hearing if I didn’t pick a recent Pepsi ad for G2 (low-calorie Gatorade) as the tone-deaf ad of the week.

You can see what Pepsi was trying to do almost immediately, but BLAM:  this thing has really come back around and smacked them in the head.  This means Pepsi now have something in common with AIG – but I’ll get to that later.

The spot switches back and forth between NBA player Kevin Barnett and a normal, suburban-looking guy – also named Kevin – swimming like crazy.  The voiceover also switches back and forth and herein lies the problem.   In trying to write a standard “athletic striving” ad, they get seriously tangled in a lot of language that many are considering cruel and insulting to people who have lost their jobs and are otherwise suffering because of the economic crisis.  See for yourself (if you can’t see the ad already, click HERE)


When I first heard about this controversy, I really, really wanted to support Pepsi.  Then I saw the ad, and that became impossible.

The lines hurtle between insensitivity and cruelty:

Garnett: “I’ve never been handed a pink slip and “I’ve never had to tell me wife ‘We can’t make the mortgage.’” (Kevin “The Big Ticket” Garnett has a $24.75 million NBA contract)

Normal Kevin: “I’ve never had to fill the holes in my sneakers with cardboard.”

That last one IMHO is the most offensive of all.  Normal Kevin appears to be taking us past unemployment and foreclosure straight on to visions of being homeless in the park.

The tragedy here is this was completely unnecessary.  The financial services companies got into trouble for how they handled their (financial services) business! Gatorade just runs right into a buzz saw for no reason at all. 

And so, let me wrap up a Friday by coming back to how Pepsi is now an AIG comrade.  Both companies have fundamentally failed to grasp how people are feeling today… how many people are suffering.  1.3 million children in the United States were homeless at some point in one year – and that was before the recession started.  I would assume that many of those children have had to use cardboard to plug the holes in their shoes.

If you think I am overdramatizing, I would respectfully suggest that you could make a mistake not dissimilar to the ones made by Pepsi and the banks, either while on the job or at a cocktail party.  This is vast, vast pain.

I am counseling clients today to look hard at the need to advertise.  If you are running ads, make sure they are seen and tested with a much broader swath of consumers and experts – ones who may not be in your target audience. 

Is all this fair?  NO ONE CARES.   We are all in the business to sell, of course, but think long-term.  If you’re not 100% secure in next week’s flight, cancel it.  Because getting this wrong could negatively affect your brand’s reputation for years, if not a lifetime.

P&G’s Charmin brand has found a fun sponsorship opportunity with SitorSquat.com.

A woman in New York, Danika Landers, started the site as a blog in 2007, and it uses Google Maps to help you find the nearest public bathrooms anywhere you may find yourself in need of one.  It purports to be the largest (only?) “toilet database and locating service” in the world.  It is essentially a wiki that is easily accessible via mobile devices including the iPhone and Blackberry.  Both the site and the downloadable apps are free to use.

Danika describes the impetus for creating the site as a personal realization that “that the act of relieving oneself is somewhat an artform” that becomes suddenly complicated “when our personal space is not our personal space.”  Anyone traveling with an infant or parent – or on any highway road trip in America – can attest to the veracity of such a conclusion. 

Danika has a little extra fun with the site by allowing users to submit a rating for the public restrooms in question; a rating of a 2.5 or over will be characterized as a “sit,” while a toilet with a lower rating will be a “squat.”  As such a rating might change with every use (ick!), I would suggest that a user make his or her own judgment in the moment:  this is truly a case where past performance may not indicate future results. P&G jumped on the opportunity to sponsor the site and its sensibility as a great fit with the brand’s overall efforts to support grassroots activities that make the bathroom experience a positive one. The company has set up mobile bathrooms at events like state fairs in the past, has had Charmin Restrooms in NYC’s Times Square for three years running (see dramatic video here!) and – my favorite – toured the U.S. from 2003 to 2005 with a bathroom mobile nicknamed ”Potty Palooza.”

“Our goal is to connect Charmin with innovative conversations and solutions as a brand that understands the importance of bringing the best bathroom experience to consumers, even when they’re away from home,” says Jacques Hagopian, brand manager for Charmin.

This blog has commented on companies sponsoring public bathrooms before – remember Visa’s sponsorship of porta-potties at a music festival last year?  While consumers may always appreciate this benefit, SitorSquat.com is likely to get bigger results for Charmin* based on brand fit and is the only site of its kind with which the brand has associated itself.   1,600 users have downloaded the mobile app thus far and the site has over 500,000 UVs since launch.  Nice find!

* Lysol just announced that it’s taking over the women’s restrooms at 9 NASCAR races this year. This also sounds like a decent brand fit, obviously.  Assuming Charmin’s sponsorship wasn’t too expensive, though, the remote/mobile aspect of SitorSquat makes it a winner as it puts the Charmin brand in the home and on the phone of thousands of users every day.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about the knowledge management and CRM strategies that are filtering into the U.S. airline industry.  Huzzah!

While I’m sure many airlines are experimenting, this particular piece features Alaska Airlines, where Steve Jarvis, the company’s head of sales and customer experience (and a man intensely focused on delighting high-value customers), talks about what they’re doing and learning along the way.  Wordlessly delivering a frequent flyer’s favorite drink (in coach) “is not about the cocktail.  The point is the recognition and thanks for your business.”  

As a frequent flyer desperate just to be treated like a human being when I get to the airport, Steve Jarvis is my hero for recognizing that it’s good to be nice to people you need and actually doing something about it.

This will not be easy.  The foundation of my entire career is customer segmentation and CRM.  I know – in technicolor – how gigantic the technological and personal demands can be inside a company determined to change.

For starters, identifying even what customers do today – at every touchpoint – requires considerable data alignment.  As with banks, airlines tend to have (a) outdated systems, that (b) don’t talk to one another.  So whether a customer buys a ticket online (and when and for how much) is likely to be invisible to a gate agent.  A phone representative most definitely does not know about the luggage problems you’ve had 2x this year already, and a customer service rep at the airport has no idea whether an email notification re. a cancelled flight was delivered to you or not.  If this information exists, it typically sits in silos that either must be refitted or, sometimes, blown up entirely.

Second, the modeling capabilities needed to capture and place a quantifiable value on behavior – evolving usually into some kind of score that informs the type of service a customer receives – is imprecise at best and far more sophisticated in industries that have been at this for decades, like banks and credit card companies.   The European airlines have a jump on us, though, and that’s good news for the learning curve.

Third, the really-really stripped down implication of all this work is that the value assigned to a customer will change the marketers’ human behavior.  This is very hard – far beyond basic training and comp changes.  In a crowded airport, you finally reach the counter, already yelling, and the agent is supposed to capture your name, “read” your score and follow the instruction that would be appropriate for a customer with that score.  Good luck.  It’s doable, but must be implemented with patience and empathy.

So if this is the direction in which the airlines realize they must head… fantastic!  There are a lot of weazened but wise customer experience/CRM/segmentation veterans out here whom I’m sure would want to help.  I, for one, will continue to watch for hints of progress, both on the plane and off.

As a promotional tactic, BOGO (Buy One, Get One Free) has been around for decades.  Now Coca-Cola has put a fresh spin on the concept.

Coke is offering a free bottle of Vault (its own Mountain Dew competitor) when you buy a bottle of Mountain Dew – a program it’s calling the “Vault Taste Challenge.”  That’s right kids, Coke is giving you its product for free when you buy the competition.

Based on the sites I’ve scanned, no one seems to remember any other marketer trying this; it’s really fascinating if you think about it. 

Why doesn’t Coke just offer coupons to get its product free?  A couple reasons: (1) The gimmick is getting a lot of mostly-positive attention in the marketing world - when was the last time an average free coupon landed on the  of AdAge? and (2) Maybe Coke actually thinks that a one-on-one taste test will show customers that Vault tastes better.  Mountain Dew has an 80% share of the citrus segment and Vault has 4% so Coke doesn’t have a lot to lose.

I feel I must report that some are griping that the program will be super-expensive, and that “a few million people” who might not have otherwise bought a Mountain Dew will now do so in order to get a free Vault.  Not likely.  Given the recession and the particular preference for citrus soda that a shopper either does or does not already have, I don’t think that helping the competition (with its 80% share) is a real concern for Coca-Cola in this instance.  No, in this case, Coke can only win with the press and the public.  And you gotta give the company points for guts.

So, rock on – promotional innovation is not dead!  I hope that some sort of results are released; it’d be interesting to see if Vault does the Dew (get it?).

Twitter.  Twitter.  Twitter.  I am twittering… but I’m getting a headache, too.

Nielsen has recently fielded a survey about the top 5 fastest growing “community destinations” and anyone who now(unwillingly) knows where all their friends are at all times coulda have predicted that the winner would be Twitter.

And regardless of what you might think of the service, you’ve got to respect this kind of insane growth:

One of the most remarkable tidbits from the survey is that Twitter’s largest demographic is users between 35 and 49 years old.  So Facebook may have invited us oldies in, but Twitter has captured our hearts.  And our hearts are captured, on average, 14 times a month for an average of 7 minutes per session.

From my experience, a lot of people are spending a lot more time on the site than this – too much time, in some cases, as captured by this funny  video:



So tweet on, my friends.  But please stop saying “Good morning,” “Good night,” and “Mmmm, coffee,” ok? If your spouse or best friend would give you a dirty look if you bothered them at work with a comment… a good standard, perhaps, to keep in mind when bugging the rest of us.

To follow me on Twitter, go to www.twitter.com/stephfierman and click “Follow.”  I promise not to share anything about my lunch.

I am often surprised at the shallow definition some have of marketing or its true meaning…. but I would not expect this from a top business school and marketing association.

According to a new article published by eMarketer, Fuqua and the AMA fielded a survey last month among 581 marketing executives “to find out how top marketing officers around the country are dealing with adverse economic conditions.”  Here’s a deck that Duke created to present the research findings.

I have not seen the survey to see the exact wording of the questions but the article says that price dominated when the CMOs were asked about customers’ top priorities in the next year.   Here’s a graphic of how their answers shook out:

 I would respectfully propose that this is a serious problem of garbage in, garbage out.   Concepts such as “innovation” and “trusting relationship” – particularly the latter – address the very essence of a brand.  No one is going to say they love Apple because of their “relationship” with the company.  Price and quality can be seen and touched: trust and value cannot be. 

That does not mean that the latter concepts are less important – they are in fact, what drive the notion of “value” (which, after all, is only a product’s competitive blend of price and quality) over a long period of time. 

But on their own, ideas such as these are not palpable to the average buyer.  My ”relationship” with a brand is like oxygen:  I can’t see it, but I know when it’s there and when it’s not. 

And I’m not even going to get into how truly problematic it is to force-rank “brand” as a consumer priority on a list that also features “price” and “quality” during a recession.   Big-time apples and oranges.

The Web has a wonderful ability to make historically opaque businesses and transactions far more transparent and accessible.

The Internet did this for car buying years ago:  between Consumer Reports, Edmonds.com, CarsDirect and a myriad of other sites, the shopper who would have previously driven to whatever dealerships happened to be local now has a lot more bargaining power… and can buy a car from anywhere in the country if the (online) price is right.

To that end, I recently commented on a TechCrunch story about a new company called DriverSide.  Like RepairPal, DriverSide.com intends to help cash-strapped consumers more effectively maintain their cars instead of having to sell or replace them.  My point was that these sites will only begin to reach their real potential when a user can write his/her need and have mechanics compete for the work via online bids, a la an eBay auction.

Almost right after I posted this comment, I stumbled on a unique application of this concept from the Netherlands: Spaarbod.  You thought Bankrate made it easier to shop for interest rates?  Spaarbod permits Dutch consumers to specify how much money they’d like to bank, for how long and on what terms, and the site (like Bankrate) returns the best rates publically available at the time.  You can accept one of these offers immediately, or Spaarbod will send your request (minus your personal information) to participating banks who can then bid on your money.  Within 24 hours, you get an email listing the five highest bidders. 

The service is free to use, and winning banks pays Spaarbod a commission when bids result in new deposits.

It’s not difficult to imagine these auctions going live, where each participating bank would have an employee bidding in real-time for a user’s deposit.   

Heck yeah!  And why do I have to shop around for the privilege of giving you my money anyway??

Such a seemingly simple idea but – on a marketwide scale – this model has major implications for advertising and marketing overall.  If engaged consumers (buyers) approach marketers (sellers) when they are in the market for a seller’s services, those sellers could potentially spend far less money on spray-and-pray mass marketing… and pass the savings on to the customer in the form of lower prices or, in this case, higher interest rates.  The advertiser is likely to spend less and the customer gets a higher-value, more customized outcome. 

Doc Searls (who also may have been the first person to use the word “conversation” in a marketing context) first coined the phrase “intention economy” to describe the idea of markets designed around engaged buyers instead of message-pusing sellers.  I’ll explore the intention economy in another post.

I realize that I’ve taken up a semi-habit of posting something goofy on Fridays… and there is definitely something goofy about McDonald’s new Filet-O-Fish ad. 

Have you seen it?  If not – and  you don’t see a video box in this post - click HERE.  There’s just something mesmerizing about it - hypnotic almost, as the fish turns and sings “Gimme back that Filet-O-Fish, gimme that Fish!” in a weird voice.  And a lot of people seem to agree with me, given that the ad’s been viewed on YouTube more than 300,000 in less than two weeks!  DJs are remixing the song in clubs, and fans are using it as a ringtone.



Most marketers will appreciate the business reasoning:  the ad developed from the challenge of producing a spot that could be used in both English and Spanish, minus the idiosyncrasies in dialogue that have plagued many an advertiser in the past.  Singing fish turns, dub in any voice and dialogue you wish, and it’s spot-on everywhere.

As you may know, there is a dust-up going on between – no, not Jim Cramer v. Jon Stewart – I’m talking about Burson-Marsteller v. Rachel Maddow.

AIG opened a Pandora’s Box when it sent a media advisory to MSNBC notifying the network that the company was adding a new shop to its list of PR firms. List, you say??  This peaked MSNBC’s/Rachel Maddow’s interest, and she has twice run lengthy segments this week regarding the firm at the top of that list:  Burson- Marsteller.

And aside from being absolutely beside herself that AIG is spending taxpayer money on spin, she offers a quite lengthy history lesson about BM, including specific references to the following Burson-Marsteller clients (Oh yeah:  she’s irritated):
- Blackwater after it killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad
- The folks at Three Mile Island post-nuclear meltdown
- The Bhopal people after the disaster that killed thousands of people in India
- The Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceauşescu
- The government of Saudi Arabia three days after 9/11
- The military junta that overthrew the government of Argentina
- The government of Indonesia, accused of genocide
- The government of Nigeria, accused of genocide and Biafra
- Philip Morris? *cough*
- A silicon breast implants manufacturer
- The government of Columbia after killing unionizers
- They Aquadot people, after it was found that the toy produced the date rape drug.

She concludes this first segment with the following statement: “When Evil needs public relations, Evil has Burson Marsteller on speed dial.“

Wow.  So I waited with interest to see Burson-Marsteller’s reaction… and think the shop missed an opportunity to sound like the grown-ups in the room.

After reading Mark Penn‘s (BM’s President) response, which includes a great deal of “for 50 years” phrases and chest-clutching indignity, I posted the following comment on www.PRWeek.com:

—- Penn had a shot here at a succinct, fact-based response, but blew it with a reaction that IMHO comes off as self-promoting, and his “mock outrage” mutes the core of his message. Phrases such as “our corporate values over the past 50 years”and “never forget over the past 20 years…” are entirely irrelevant and, more importantly, causes the reader to wonder as to the actual intent of this response.

From the way this is written, it appears to me that Penn felt he needed to address at least four different audiences: MSNBC/the cable news business, employees, clients and potential clients. I would propose that the firm would have been better off with shorter and more customized messages to each rather than this rambling catch-all that had to do double or triple (or four-ple??) duty.

And one last thing: I only read the entire statement because Penn’s statement that B-M wasn’t hired to help “burnish [AIG's] image” caught my eye. As a long-time marketing/mgmt exec, let me be clear: regardless of the specific task my team may give an agency, it is ALWAYS a PR shop’s job to help build (or “burnish,” if you will) a client’s image 24/7. If I were under siege at AIG, this comment alone would make me wonder, “What am I paying these guys for??” —–

And in a Penn v. Maddow mud wrestle?  My money is on Maddow.

It’s been nearly 18 months since I interviewed the marketing and communications brains behind the highly successful tap water effort, Tappening.  Man, time flies when people are out saving the planet!

I also covered Tappening’s first ad campaign right HERE, which took iconic imagery and – without being too heavy-handed – delivered a hard message about the global impact of bottled water.

Mark Dimassimo and Eric Yaverbaum created Tappening as a fun and meaningful consumer movement to sensitize everyone to the financial and societal costs of bottled water and to “make tap water cool again.”  Since then, the effort has gone so public, and reached so many fans, that not only are average people making fan videos on YouTube but the effort was recently the cover story of Brilliant Results magazine.  To see a pdf of the cover and the full story, click HERE.

Keep up with Tappening:  it’s not only a model for how to create a messaging phenom from nothing – drinking tap water is a quick and easy step you can take to help preserve our world and save money.

Tappening Mark_Dimassimo Ericho_PR Eric_Yaverbaum tap_water Dimassimo_Goldstein

Brilliant Results-Tappening

I follow Jeffry Pilcher‘s TheFinancialBrand.com on Twitter and have enjoyed his insights.

Recently, Jeffry caught something that tells us just how bad the financial situation is.

Yes folks, these institutions are so upset, and have become so unstable, that they are literally peeing their own metaphorical pants.  And their grammar stinks.  Oh, I know:  it’s shocking!

Jeffry points out something that shouldn’t be a surprise, however:  anything that represents a financial company today that is viewed or experienced by the public – even signage in a local branch - deserves additional scrutiny.  The smallest failure in personal service can undermine costly efforts elsewhere.

Did I mention that this sign was posted on the door of a credit union inside the U.S. Capitol Building?

Jeffry_Pilcher TheFinancialBrand.com Politico.com

Skittles’ foray into the social media universe had the marketing blogosphere and Twitterverse on overdrive week.

On Tuesday, Mars replaced the candy’s “normal” website with a live feed from Twitter.com of tweets that mentioned Skittles.  If you click HERE, you’ll get a current snapshot of what that site might have looked like several days ago when this experiment first began, but things have calmed down dramatically since then.  When I took a look at the feed on that first day, there were tweets full of curse words,  comments such as “I found a finger in my bag of Skittles,” “Skittles are made from dead animals,” “Skittles gives you cancer and kills babies,”  “Eating Skittles will kill your parents” and so on.

In other words, the idea that anything in a tweet would instantly appear at skittles.com brought adults out of the woodwork to see just how outrageous and inappropriate they could be before Skittles changed strategy.  Alas, all these tweets did appear on the site, and it was child’s play (pardon the pun) to get around the site’s age verification tool in order to see every word. 

That’s just dumb – and dangerous.  If one 8-year old had done something awful as a result of viewing some sort of silly fake directive as to what to do with Skittles… Mars would have had an enormous and entirely self-provoked communications disaster on its hands.

So while many marketers labeled Skittles’ experiment as bold and exciting, I stand with a minority who is not with the “lemmings” on this one.   The site started as a confusing mish-mash of wildly unacceptable language attached to a candy, and has since evolved into the most boring site in the category. 

Social media is not an end in itself.  No tactic ever is.  Advertising’s goal is to create goodwill and sales among a product’s target market. Will this effort do that?  No.  And did the stunt bring non-buyers out in droves?  You bet.

While Mars (or its ad agency) may certainly win some wacky 2009 social media award when all is said and done, look for the company to announce that this “successful experiment” has come to an end, and that it is returning to a more standard interactive (and managed) site.  It couldn’t happen soon enough.
Skittles Skittles_Twitter

It is a good thing that bank and investment advertising no longer touts high-higher-highest (!) returns, Morningstar stars, 40-something couples retiring to their house(s) in paradise, and the like.   Outside of just a few stalwarts, such as Vanguard with its measured point of view and Bogle-esque approach, many of the siren calls in the newspaper, on television and online had all begun to (or already did) sound and look the same.  That’s not effective.

Now we appear to have swung all the way to the other extreme.  Take a look at a list of advertisers, all crammed into today’s Wall Street Journal, along with text pulled verbatim from their ads:

MORGAN STANLEY:  “To find the smart investments today, you need to be world wise.”

MERRILL LYNCH (aka Bank of America):  “Seeing clearly.  Acting confidently.”   “With personal insight into your goals and an understanding of the market…” “…Find a smart place for your money.”

CME GROUP: “Rise Above the Risk.” “For more than a century CME Group has provided competitive, transparent and safe markets.” “…protect customers and ensure financial integrity by guaranteeing the performance of every transaction on our exchange.”

TD AMERITRADE: “There’s never been a better time for a second opinion.”

FIDELITY: “Guaranteed income you can live with.”

GLENMEDE: “There’s no substitute for safety and stability.”

PNC:  “…It’s also a way of doing business that has strength and stability at its very core.”

Safe, smart, transparent and guaranteed: these are the adjectives financial firms are now scrambling to use, as they adjust to our new reality  The problem is – well, it’s the same problem as before – if you sound like everyone else, the messages essentially melt into one and stakeholders become unable to distinguish one from the other.  If I held a focus group tonight, and scrambled the names of the above firms and the quoted text, I would challenge anyone to re-match the elements correctly.

I’ll also say this:  killing your ads’ effectiveness may, in fact, be the most benign result.  Worse?  Just as when every firm claimed great returns – which turned out to be untrue and, in some cases, unscrupulous – everyone claiming safety now looks equally unlikely and untrustworthy.

All of these brands are more and are capable of doing more: the “more” being the hard work needed to determine exactly what it is about the brand that is unique and distinguishable from the competition.*

Without doing this work, going out with a “safety” message isn’t safe at all.

* I am aware that many of the above firms are in different businesses and are not competitors per se.  It does not matter, because it does not matter to the public. For individual investors (and Congress…), too much of the same becomes one, amorphous perception.

Morgan_Stanley Ameritrade PNC Fiduciary_Trust_International Glenmede_Investment Fidelity CME_Group

Phew:  pharma advertising.

One of the mini-economies that is thriving in New York City is healthcare/pharma ad agencies.  Always have, always will.  You can imagine the regulatory knowledge, the stamina, the patience, the detail that must go into such work – or I can, at least.

Case in point… Bristol Myers Squibb recently pulled the ad on the right (if you cannot see the ad, click HERE.   The ad was part of a print campaign that suggested HIV/AIDS patients “ask your doctor” about drugs that may have a lower incidence of diarrhea (a common side effect of certain drugs).  The ad was yanked under pressure from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest non-profit HIV/AIDS organization in the US.

And while declaring the ad ”a blatant attempt to scare and mislead patients and… intimidate patients into switching to BMS’ own HIV/AIDS drugs,” the AHF is driving the point home with its own new parody ad, which it called a “public service announcement.”  The parody uses a similar image, with the words, “We don’t give a crap how you live as long as you buy our drug!” scrawled across the toilet.

The AHF says it sent a letter to BMS’s CEO last August asking the company to stop running “these types of advertisements,” but received no response.

As a total outsider, I can see that the ad clearly leverages fear to make its point.  But what are a drug company’s options?

A bit of research reveals that, in 2005, the AHF asked BMS to pull a campaign that the foundation claimed wasn’t serious enough: ads, the AHF claimed, that underplayed the risks of HIV.  A BMS ad showing two men playing backgammon on a beach under a headline of ”The Word on HIV: Fight HIV Your Way” was faulted as delivering the message that ”‘I don’t have to be that careful about getting HIV because I can go to the beach and pop pills.”

Let me be clear here:  (a) it’s a drug company’s job to get these messages right, and (b) they make millions of dollars on the sales of these drugs each and every year. 

But in a business that is all about life or death, about pain and caring and emotion, one could see how it might be difficult to balance all the messages required in a way that could satisfy all parties involved.
Bristol_Myers_Squibb drug_advertising pharmaceutical_advertising

The enormous matters of CEO and corporate trust and transparency - or the lack thereof – are everywhere these days.  The need for CEOs to be open and honest… to communicate with all of their stakeholders about what’s happening and what they’re doing to ensure their companies survive the recession.  Weber Shandwick, a very large PR agency that’s won many accolades, has taken a position at the front of the line on this topic.

Weber Shandwick has a practice called ReputationRx, and its site offers numerous press releases and papers, including “Seven Out of 10 Global Executives Fear For Their Corporate Reputations As Online Risks Grow” and ”Company Leaders Not Communicating To Employees On Financial Crisis.” The agency’s CEO, Harris Diamond, penned an Op-Ed for The Washington Times in October titled, “A crisis of confidence, The lost art of communication.”  Etc. etc.   The place takes reputation and open communication seriously.

So I had to laugh at the inadvertent comedic timing of a just-received business school event newsletter [verbatim] :

THE C.E.O. SERIES: MANAGING AND COMMUNICATING IN ECONOMIC CRISIS
Tuesday, 3/31/09 at 12:00pm
Harris Diamond, C.E.O. of Weber Shandwick Worldwide, will share his thoughts on communicating to stakeholders when your company is going through a rough patch. THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED!

After offering a trustmeister wince of sympathy (these things happen) all I can say is…

Come on: that’s funny.

Weber_Shandwick Columbia_Business_School