Archive for the ‘PR’ Category

Converging unusually with my tech pr orbit today is a beauty sector online pr campaign for Lash Allure MD who offered amateur vloggers a prize of $100,000. Competitors had to say what they would do with the money if they won it with the winner selected by public vote.

The winner has just been announced as 19 year old New Yorker Meekakitty, a rising YouTube comedy star, with 135K subscribers to her channel and close to 2 million views of her posts. Here’s the winning entry:

Tiger Woods’s agent Mark Steinberg has won the annual PR BIMBO award for ‘dumb public comments’, awarded by Dallas based agency, Spaeth Communications. In this case, it was what he didn’t say that won him the award.

‘The purpose of the BIMBO awards” says the company, ‘is to remind people that communication is strategic and can have a very real impact, In this instance, Tiger’s lack of communication has cost him his reputation and millions of dollars in endorsements.’

‘Team Tiger earns a failing grade on handling the crisis at Tiger’s house. He didn’t say anything for days, and then had mealy mouth, whiny comments about “transgressions” and “personal sins” on his website. His team also failed at communicating with their key audiences, Tiger himself, and helping Tiger communicate with his key audiences.

“This wasn’t ‘managing’ Tiger’s career,” said Merrie Spaeth. “This was criminal mismanagement. Professionals are hired for their experience and advice, even when the client doesn’t want to hear it.”

Last year’s BIMBO winner was Bear Sterns Chief Executive, Alan Schwartz, who said, in the week the bank was rescued from insolvency by JP Morgan, “we don’t see any pressure on liquidity.”

BBC news has really been cranking up the snow news today, live reports from every inch of the country, stories of road ‘misery’ and ‘a few hardy souls’ venturing out on the high street to get their shopping (while someone walks past quite normally with a hat on).

While they fluff up the snow reports here, proof that ski resorts have actually been inflating their snow levels has emerged in the US. A Dartmouth College study ‘Wintertime for Deceptive Advertising’ has found that while resorts routinely report 23% deeper snow at weekends, US government weather research show there is no such pattern.

Suspicions of opportunism grow when it’s revealed that it’s the ski resorts without money back guarantees but with local customers that are the worst offenders, rather than resorts whose customers fly in and take a punt on there being lots of the fluffy stuff about. Read the rest of this entry »

First Pepsi drop their Super Bowl TV ad slot for the first time in 23 years, preferring to create dialogue through a new website www.RefreshEverything.com, now Volvo has launched the first video of its new S60 model on its Facebook page only, ahead of it’s official debut at the Geneva Car show in March. Here it is:

If there was an award for best PR campaign by a disgruntled consumer 2009, it would have to go to Dave Carroll, the musician who, frustrated by United Airlines’s refusal to compensate him for a broken guitar, wrote a song about it and posted it on YouTube. Two weeks and 3 million views later he was on Oprah.

With all this X Factor/Rage against the machine rivalry, some Christmas mood is being lost I feel, so here’s the best Christmas song ever, dedicated to our clients, thank you and happy holidays.

To join the festive poll, tweet your favourite to #BestXmasSongEver

Now here’s a quality holiday video from US advertising legend Jeff Goodby, of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners SF, broken from his reverie for the good old days by an upstart new generation ‘Facebook Creative’ who he proceeds to rap battle – brilliant.

StrongMail’s survey of marketer’s spend intentions for 2010, in a flat market, shows the upstarts email, social media and search continuing to cannibalise poor old direct mail and events while advertising remains unmoved.

PR comes in fourth, with a small net gain – damned with faint praise, which begs the question, where does PR fit in an increasingly online world?

Do marketers see PR as just about media relations, just more online than in print these days? I suspect yes. Certainly I don’t think they see PR as the natural place to look for social media or email content, definitely not search, yet these should be natural areas for PR people.

While many marketers say they are going to spend more on social media, they are still going to have a hard time negotiating a separate budget for it, which leaves the door open a crack. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t like to have a pop, but material is thin this morning and like when a comedian turns on a member of the audience to distract from his own failings, I’m going to have a go at Ogilvy. On the day Lord Mandleson won The Plain English Campaign’s Foot in Mouth prize for this sentence:

”Perhaps we need not more people looking round more corners but the same people looking round more corners more thoroughly to avoid the small things detracting from the big things the Prime Minister is getting right.”

Ogilvy has come up with this about their new social media product (I think).

The snappy headline:

Ogilvy’s 360 Degree Global Digital Influence Group Launches Insider Circle(TM), a New Influencer Relationship Management Social Media Product Read the rest of this entry »

YouTube has launched a New Year countdown channel of the most memorable videos of the year, sponsored by Samsung. Like an advent calendar without the religious connotations, each day a new video is revealed. Though the selection process is opaque, the number of views seems to play a big part. This sleepwalking dog from day two for example, Bizkit, has had getting on for 12 million views: