I am sensitive to dumb and/or insensitive imagery and statements in advertising and the media - I thought that the “How I Met Your Mother” Frosty the Snowman spoof was a little over the top, for example - but this is pushing it.
A new commercial for the all-natural line of cleaning products, Method, has already been pulled - and that’s a pity.
Droga5’s “SHINY SUDS” is a silly send-up of Dow’s Scrubbing Bubbles commercials. Method created the video to support the Household Products Labeling Act, which would require full disclosure of harmful chemicals in cleaning products. Here’s the ad (if you cannot see the ad below, click HERE):
Right after the video was posted online, women began to react negatively - and harshly. A blogger accused the company of “humiliating women” and effectively saying that - if you don’t know exactly what’s in the products you use - “you deserve to be sexually harassed” in your own home. A reader of the same blog post called Method to tell them that she was “curious of [sic] their perpetuation of rape culture.”
Rape culture? Sexual harassment? The “pornification” of a dull House act about cleaning chemicals? What am I missing here?
Apparently a lot, as the company received hundreds of calls and emails from outraged women before declaring itself a “values-based company” and pulling the spot.
Of course, there are other interested parties who struck back, most notably (a) the advertising community (which asks when brands are going to - ahem - “grow a pair” and tell zealot ”idiots” to bug off) and (b) both men and women who say that this “overreaction” is just another example of why many believe that feminism has become a joke.
I’m not going to lean that hard in either direction… but I didn’t see the danger in this video. What do you think?
New Balance has created an online/social media campaign and (offline) line of shoes that marries both worlds in the most elegant way.
The 574 men’s and women’s collection is made entirely of left-over scraps of cloth in the company’s Lawrence, MA factory and, as a result, each pair is just a bit different – each has its own personality, you might say. A very special, limited line deserves equally powerful promotion, and the company’s ad agency, Mother, knew it.
When you buy a 574 pair from one of ten boutiques in the U.S., there’s a special Polaroid photograph in the box. The owner can then go to 574Clips.com, and match the Polaroid to a special mini-film about the shoe. Once the film has played, the happy shoe wearer can add his/her name at the end of the film. The film for 106Red appears to show a man dipping a carrot into the shoe (for dip, or course), while 115Green has a lovable furry muppet (with green nose to match) admiring a pair of shoes. Each is very short and fun – check out one or two for yourself, and see if it doesn’t make you want to buy the shoes.
574Clips.com also features links to Facebook, MySpace, De.li.ci.ous and Tumblr, so buyers of these unique shoes can tell (and show) all their friends. The campaign is also tied to sneaker culture blogs like High Snobiety and Nice Kicks.
Anyone who watches Entourage (Episode 3, Season 6) knows how culturally important “sneakerheads” are – the (mostly) men who must have the hottest, most limited sneaker available tend to be heavy influencers and leading indicators of pop culture trends and information. It’s a valuable and – in their own milieu – sophisticated crowd, and Mother has delivered an equally sophisticated communications plan. The blending of manufacturing, blogs, web, community, video and product is exceptional.
And now I must sign off - I’m on my way to Reed Space: the only shop in NYC to carry the $75 shoes with the special Polaroid inside…
A new study released by Q Interactive indicates that - while women may be flocking to social networking - they’re not yakking about the favorite baby food or burgers. While 52% of 1,000 women said that they’d become a “friend” or “fan” of at least one brand, 75% of women in the study overall say that social networks do not influence what they buy.
I had to smile when Q’s president scrambled to make sure that marketers (with money) didn’t interpret the results in a negative way: Q calls the “disconnect” a “huge opportunity” for marketers and says that brands need to catch up to the needs of women online.
If I were an agency relying on clients, I’d say the same thing!
But what if that’s not true? What if the social media frenzy that’s been whipped up among advertisers is… overhyped? What if we find out that women love discovering new ideas and interacting with new people and new communities, but the commercial promise in these interactions isn’t there? What if online engagement doesn’t lead to sales? What if talking just leads to… talking?
I’m going to watch for new news and information about how women are interacting with social media because - if Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and all the other social sites do not turn out to be a brand bonanza for advertisers, we could see a major reset in expectations, involvement and, most importantly, dollars.
Well, my Tappening idols - Mark DiMassimo and Eric Yaverbaum - are back with a new campaign that got a big write-up in The New York Times yesterday. Boo-yah!
As you may know, Tappening is a grass-roots effort DiMassimo and Yaverbaum started together as a laboratory for a social world marketing experiment focused on the negatives associated with bottled water (which - outside of convenience - turns out to be pretty much everythingabout bottled water). I first interviewed them nearly two years ago about the initiative and covered their first ad campaign back in March of this year. To date, Tappening has sold about $5 million worth of re-usable BPA-free plastic and stainless steel bottles, much of which is plowed back into the effort.
The team’s second campaign turns up the heat. “Lying in Advertising” includes several treatments featuring such claims as “Bottled water causes blindness in puppies” and “Bottled water is the primary cause of Restless Leg Syndrome.” If you cannot see the posters below, click HERE and check out the bottom of the page.
The new campaign has a dedicated website at www.startalie.com from which you can easily ”spread” your lie about bottled water via email, Digg, Twitter and Facebook (a nice touch). My first contribution was “Ben Bernanke says that bottled water caused the global recession.”
Which entities would have a really tough time attracting positive attention right now? AIG, yes. GM, no question. Bernie Madoff, no doubt.
Added to the list are two little words that have to got to shake any agency to its core: Mexican tourism.
Yes vacationers, remember Mexico? That was the place to which thousands of you were headed before the swine flu outbreak… and the resulting fears have weighed heavily on Mexico’s economy.
The United Nations World Tourism Organization says the country boasts one of the largest tourism businesses in the world, welcoming more than 20 million tourists a year. It’s the only country in Latin America on the list of top 25 most popular vacation destinations, and tourism is the third largest contributor to the economy. 70% of all visitors come from the United States.
But that was before the cooties came.
President Calderon plans to spend $92 million on new advertising and promotion to bring tourists back. With t-shirts boasting “I went to Mexico and all I got was the swine flu” in circulation, he understandably feels he’s got to do something.
There’s no real point to this post. I think I just wanted to express a certain kinship and sympathy for a brand that feels it must include a medical update, the phrase “keep the people safe” and a quote from the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health in its new television ad.
Oh, well now I’m definitely in the mood for a Cancun vacation! Que es muy terrible.
I have no idea if they’ll sell even one tampon, but P&G’s Tampax is the stealth sponsor of a series of viral videos that tell the story of a 16-year-old boy who wakes up with - uh - “girl parts.” And at least from an art point of view… they’re good. Click HERE if you do not see the ad below.
Leo Burnett created the campaign at Zack16.com. Its big link to the brand thus far is when our hero, Zack, gets his first period in French class and sneaks into the girl’s bathroom looking for a Tampax vending machine.
P&G calls it “a learning lab out on the net” that’s “not very heavily branded at all.” Hmm. And so far the videos aren’t a huge hit, with about 10,000 views in the past week on YouTube and elsewhere.
I really wanted to dislike this campaign and - if I were a P&G stockholder - I probably would. I also wonder if the best way to pitch tampons to young women is with stories about young men baking brownies, but what do I know? I hope it sells something.
In the meantime, I’m enjoying the work of a good copywriter and have started following Zack on Twitter at @ZackJohnson16. He appears to be trying to figure out how to manage menstruating while at soccer camp.
Note: the “hovers like a UFO” comment is from the Day 3 video. Really - these are pretty humorous.
So yes, this is another post about Twitter. What can I say? It’s the fastest growing, probably weirdest social media phenom thus far, and I’ve been sucked in.
One of today’s interesting tweety tidbits is a quite lengthy email that Rupert Murdoch - sorry, I meant the Deputy Managing Editor at The Wall Street Journal - recently sent to employees outlining “do’s” and “don’ts” for employees on Twitter or otherwise engaged on the “social Web.”
It’s sort of a doozy.
Don’t ”friend” confidential sources, don’t criticize colleagues, and my favorite (verbatim): “Don’t engage in any impolite dialogue with those who may challenge your work — no matter how rude or provocative they may seem.”
Employees may cite (but not push) their own reporting and - well, that seems to be pretty much all they can do. And even that rule, as you can see, comes with a murky qualification.
Some of the restrictions make perfect sense, such as not detailing how an article was edited. Others are ripe for wrongful discharge lawsuits, such as the “don’t” that says you mustn’t recruit family or friends to promote your work.
In most instances, this particular restriction would be nearly impossible to dissect and prove. If I retweet comments from a former colleague who then talks up my work, did I solicit that positive feedback? And, I’m sorry: if my mom claims that I’m just the cleverest person ever ever ever, there’s nothing I can do about it.
So I was thinking that the whole thing seemed very 1984… until I spotted a blog post detailing real tweets that some knuckleheads have posted on Twitter. A sample (with all grammar errors intact):
- “I just got to work (Oracle) and I am doing as little as possible”
- “Huh, with my boss on twitter, maaaybe I should take down that sexy picture of her… but her reaction will be priceless!”
- “hate my job!! i want to tell my bosses how dumb they are and how meaningless this job is, then quit, and be happy!”
- “Workin… This job sucks worse then [sic] the economy!”
The title of this blog post? “TwitterFired: The Top Ten Tweets to Get You Fired.”
Huh. Maybe The Wall Street Journal Twitter police knows what it’s doing.
Man, it’s a tough time to be a media company. What with News Corp.’s operating income dropping 47% (99% in the newspaper business and 97% in the TV division) and both Arianna Huffington and Jeff Bewkes declaring the death of big media, what’s a media mogul - or budding mogul - to do?
One obvious answer IMHO should be an enhanced, more enlightened focus on women, because their behavior is changing and not enough advertisers and media companies appear to be keeping pace. 36% of women claim to be reading fewer magazines and 39% are spending less time reading newspapers. These are consumers - moms, in particular - who control 85% of all household spending and are worth more than $2 trillion in US spend each year. That’s “trillion” with a “t.”
A lot of these women say they’re migrating online. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is women age 40-50 in the home; moms aged 25-35 with at least one child are heavy online shoppers (see chart); and twitter moms showed Motrin who’s boss in November 2008. “Power moms” are also increasingly focused on video, and even upload their own on a variety of topics at sites like NewBaby.com.
Wednesday April 29th 2009, 6:36 pm
Filed under: Internet, blogs
There have been a number of lawsuits in the last 24 months or so that basically seek to determine the responsibility an online delivery mechanism has for the content it carries.
There’s the fashion model, Liskula Cohen, who sued Google for a number of personal remarks that a blogger wrote using Blogger - a Google property.
Or one of my personal favorites, AuditAdmit.com, which raced to wipe its system of the IP addresses after comments about Yale law school students (females) became so vicious that the victims sued. They got somewhere, but mostly because the two owners of the site cracked under pressure.
Note to Ms. Cohen: Google isn’t likely to crack under pressure.
The latest, of course, is the call for Craigslist.org to eliminate its “erotic services” section, following the murder of a woman who went to a hotel and meet a man she first encountered on the site. And now there appears to be attempted copycat crimes, as well. And it’s pile-on time now, too: people who try to sell stuff on the site and subsequently are assaulted by would-be buyers they met on the site, etc.
It’s all pretty awful. The question is: who’s responsible and - once we determine responsibility - does it matter? Do the attorneys general urging Craigslist to remove the section really care about the legal backing they have for asking the site to cut the section? I’d say no.
It’s challenging for me to fault Craigslist for individuals knowingly and legally advertising their services and then coming to some harm in the fulfillment of those services (the illegal ads gotta go). Craigslist is the Internet version of all the personals and “massage” advertising that’s run at the back of local newspapers and magazines for decades.
I’m processing this, but my first conclusion is that there is no reason that Craigslist couldn’t start a ratings system much like Amazon’s - so you know something about the “seller” and the “buyer” - and also make it very clear that IP addresses are kept and will be turned over to authorities if any illegal activities result. There’s clear precedent for the former, and the latter… Craigslist would merely be enforcing its existing TOU (Item 6). This is “bare minimum” stuff.
This isn’t over, as it’s no different that the contentious debates over free speech that take place in the “real world” today. Do I believe in the First Amendment? Absolutely. Would I want to be Google or Craigslist when the mother of a dead girl goes on national television claiming that (perfectly legal) content on my site killed her child? Absolutely not.
There have been several articles recently pointing to the rise in both offline and online coupon use. While consumers 65+ are more likely to use newspaper coupons and younger individuals prefer online coupons, there’s no real news here given that these stats will change over time as newspapers become less available and older consumers become more and more comfortable on the Web.
In the meantime, don’t leave home - or buy online - without it!
I’ve become accustomed to checking online for coupons and promotion codes prior to making either a store or Web purchase. There is an art to this and, once you get the hang of it, you’ll become savvier about what sites are likely to bear fruit and which will not.
There are four general categories of sites I’d recommend you consider:
1. Aggregators - these are sites whose sole purpose in life is to offer coupons and “promo codes” from many retailers, typically across multiple industries. Some examples would include:
4. Forums - some activities tend to make people want to vent (like having to take your shoes off at the airport…), and folks on these sites love to let others in on a deal:
If you’re set on a particular brand, it only takes a second to check out that company’s own site, too. KFC, for example, has a pre-set button on its home page pointing visitors to printable coupons. I’m actually surprised that more brands don’t take advantage of this simple way to build a solid customer database. If a consumer is a fan, he will part with valuable demo and psychographic information in exchange for a steady stream of deals delivered by email.
And as a final tip: consider opening a brand new email account exclusively for your interactions with coupon and promotional sites. You’ll be able to see all your coupon- and deal-related email in one place without clogging your own email inbox.
So start looking for coupons online and, pretty soon, you too will understand the nirvana of “stackable codes…”
Whether you are job-hunting or not… this is absolutely must-see TV. I was tempted to show you just one of the videos here, but decided it would break up the flow.
My favorite is #13 - watch her hand. What’s yours?
While restaurant chains suffer, and the industry predicts a “purge,” one restaurant has decided to let its customers take more of a direct role in its future.
Sghetti’s Italian Bistro, a local restaurant in Pennsylvania, has established a “pay what you think it’s worth” policy. The menu no longer shows specific prices, opting instead for a suggested price range by category: appetizers $3-$9, pasta $6-$12 and so on. The offer is good for parties of 8 or less at dinner only, beginning at 4pm.
“[The recession] is sad, for senior citizens and young families,” says the spot’s owner, Eugene Razzano. “…we can do something to empower people.” Razzano recognizes that some diners won’t be fair, but believes that the press coverage and increased traffic - particularly return traffic - will make this a successful proposition overall.
I think this is brilliant. Razzano has been very clear that he is assessing the program on a week-to-week basis. High-margin beverages are not included, and parties are asked to tip the wait staff, as usual. He’s getting full-blown word of mouth, while still protecting himself on the downside.
Part of the commentary on this blog lately has seen me preaching restraint to businesses advertising at such a sensitive time. If you’re going to put a message out there, be 100% certain that it connects to how people are feeling and what they are experiencing. Even if a negative reaction happens “outside your target audience,” it can have an outsized ability to impact business over the mid- to short-term. My opinion is that companies including Pepsi and Hawker have taken risks with their brand images by promoting messages that are out of tune with the public zietgeist.
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?).
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 Resultsmagazine. 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.
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
Did you see the Oscars telecast this past weekend? Third worst-rated show in history. Just painful. I adore Hugh Jackman (duh), so I watched his interview with Barbara Walters before the ceremony started. The first-time host told Barbara that he would indeed perform and that he felt the awards needed “more show, less business.” I think we just needed less of everything.
Aside from Kate Winslet, “best performance” has to go to Glam Media, the women-focused vertical network boasting over 75 million users and 700 publishers. comScore has named Glam one of the top 10 media properties on the Web.
While the likes of ABC (who did not stream the broadcast!), Twitter and Facebook wandered around trying to figure out how to make money on online Oscar conversations - celebs in the audience and at the parties were twittering, for cryin’ out loud - Glam just went ahead and hosted its ownTwitter widget. Glam then offered advertisers the opportunity to sponsor an edited version of the tweet stream during the telecast.
Glam hand-selected which tweets appeared in the stream, thereby making it safer for brand advertisers who are always (and understandably) concerned about appearing alongside a conversation that veers into unacceptable subjects.
Aveenosponsored the Twitter widget, and Glam says it will introduce widgets for both FriendFeed and Facebook streams running during future shows and other events.
Poaching on other sites’ turf to generate ad dollars, when those sites haven’t figured it out themselves? Nicely done!
Last night, the first annual Shorty Awards gala took place in Brooklyn. The Shorty Awards honor the best producers of Twitter content (tweets) in 26 categories including Advertising, Brand and Social Media.
And, Mon Dieu! - the drama! Accusations of ballot box stuffing, paying for votes and other forms of cheating are rampant! One of the biggest controversies has focused on the winner of the Advertising category, a woman named Carri Bugbee who tweets in character as Peggy Olson (@peggyolson) from the AMC TV series “Mad Men.” When she won, a fellow Twitterer who owns a real ad agency actually got mad and spammed Bugbee with endless pop-ups of a Rick Astley music video (so random…). He had hoped to capture the nation’s attention by winning the award, he said. “She’s not real,” he cried! Yeah, we get that. But she’s good. Better luck next year.
In a charming twist, each winner used a tweet (all 140 characters of it) as his or her acceptance speech. Maybe the Oscars should try that.
Should you be on Twitter? There’s no concrete answer here, of course - and I’m speaking only about individuals at this point, not companies. If you are interested in keeping up with and participating in the changing social media environment, you might give it a whirl. If you think you have something to say and can tweet 3-4 tweets a day (which is considered a decent volume and frequency) I’d say go for it. And another huge advantage is that you can “follow” other Twitterers whose opinions you’ll see on your own page each day. Just beware those who believe “Hmmm. Coffee!” is a good tweet.
Fortunately, Twitter makes “unfollowing” easy, too.
BBC Radio created a widget that calculates the food equivalent of your alcohol intake. Try it for yourself by clicking HERE or on the image on the left.
Two regular beers and a cola (no zero calorie stuff) equals 420 calories, or the equivalent of one slice of pizza, a donut, a jaffa cake (a biscuit-like cake) and a fried onion thingy the Brits eat called a bahji.
Some friends are having a pub crawl this weekend (yes, they are all over 30 years of age; it’s sad, really). The event starts at 12 noon and ends who knows when - say midnight. Let’s be conservative and say you drink one beer every couple hours, 3 colas and a tonic water. Those 1,330 calories are equivalent to:
- 1 hot dog
- 1 burger
- 1 slice of pizza
- 1 donut
- 1 pastry
- 2 jaffa cakes AND
- 2 of those funky fried onion things
And those 1,300+ calories don’t include the stuff you need to absorb all the booze: food! Think about college: four years worth of pizza, McDonald’s, pizza, subs, cheesesteaks, pizza, bar visits… *Shudder*
In all seriousness, the BBC site and radio shows are part of a series about alcoholism and its devastating effects. Both are connected to the Drinkaware Trust, an organization focused on changing Britain’s drinking habits. Drinkaware is a non-profit that offers funding for education work and other projects dedicated to addressing the misuse of alcohol. It is funded by “voluntary” contributions from UK’s alcohol industry (smart).
The online/social media environment has greatly amplified the opportunities for customers who love you (or hate you) to spread the word - and spread it more frequently, to a broader audience and with a greater array of tools.
Colloquy has released a white paper reflecting the results of an October 2008 survey that measured the intersection between reward program membership and online word-of-mouth (WOM) activity among those members.
While I hope it won’t come as a big surprise, membership in and usage of a brand’s reward program is a significant predictor of a consumer’s likelihood to speak positively about your brand online. The more active the frequent user/shopper/flyer in your program, the greater the chance that you will experience the happy halo effect of him/her praising you online. This is particularly true among women, who have become a driving force in terms of discussing and sharing products and experiences on the Web (Motrin, anyone?).
The larger take-away here - the hardest one, I think, for large companies to absorb - is that everything is connected now. The idea that you could treat your customers one way and your employees another, without affecting your public persona, is no longer relevant. Cut your charitable activities without the “outside world” finding out? Forget it. Increase mileage requirements in your frequent flyer program, and it will not only affect the opinions of your members, but also those members’ Twitter readers (who may not even be your customers).
One person with an anonymous blog and a catchy URL can impact your reputation around the world.
Of course The New Champion Customers is just a tip of this iceberg, but it offers an interesting angel and chock-full of great charts. Take a look.
I saw an interesting story today about Virgin America - a company infamous for its own tongue-in-cheek advertising approach - suing an ad industry blog for libel.
It seems that Adrants posted a parody ad showing a photograph of the US Airways Flight 1549 jet in the Hudson River along with Virgin’s name and mark, plus the message “Fly Virgin.” Here’s the ad:
The initial blog post, titled “The Hudson Crash: Just One More Reason to Fly Virgin,” provided a disclaimer that the ad’s origin was “suspect” but also mused that perhaps the ad was real given that Virgin had “turned ugly situations to its advantage before.”
While Adrants updated its original post to point out that the ad was a spoof (and removed it altogether after 3 days), Virgin went ahead and filed a complaint in a California district court claiming, among other things, ”trademark infringement, deceptive advertising and defamation.” The outrage! How dare you take advantage of such a horrible event… we would never do that. We are forever damaged! GAH!”
Most experts believe that Virgin is on thin ice (pardon the pun) given that the medium (in this case, Adrants) is commonly known to report “news” with a certain irreverence, therefore making it highly unlikely that a blog reader would be confused into believing that the ad was factual.
But is this even a real lawsuit or simply another “real” example of Virgin’s ability to spot and take advantage of a timely marketing opportunity? I vote for the latter.
Crazy kids! What do you bet this lawsuit will disappear altogether after Virgin has squeezed all the word-of-mouth mileage possible out of it?
In the meantime, I’m enjoying the work of a good copywriter and have started following Zack on Twitter at 
Tappening 
Mark_Dimassimo 
Ericho_PR 
Eric_Yaverbaum 
tap_water 
Dimassimo_Goldstein 
Skittles 
Skittles_Twitter 
Twitter
@peggyolson 
alcohol_abuse 
BBC 
alcoholism 
Drinkaware 
Motrin moms
Colloquy
WOMMA
Adrants
Virgin_America
Virgin_America_Adrants
