Brandjack News

News and commentary around the concept of brandjacking

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  • Olbermann and O’Reilly dragged into escalating Williams conflict

    By Quentin Langley     If you were reporting from the capital of a country at war, would you say you were reporting from a "war zone"? There's no way to answer that question without more details. If, during America's involvement in the Vietnam War, you have been in Saigon, then, yes. If you had been in…

  • Should your CEO be a spokesperson in a crisis?

    By Quentin Langley The tempting approach to this question is simply to say not if it is Tony Hayward but yes if it is Richard Branson. That's absolutely part of it. Who among your senior leadership has the skills for this demanding role? But there are other key considerations. Sometimes the right answer is to say…

  • Nestlé’s Beneful dog food faces legal challenge

    By Quentin Langley CNN is reporting a legal action against Nestlé over the alleged health complications associated with its Purina Beneful brand. While, obviously, no-one is suggesting that Nestlé deliberately set out to poison dogs, there is a suggestion that they knew it was harmful and sold it without proper investigation of the reports of…

  • #SpeakBeautiful campaign a big risk

    By Quentin Langley Apparently women tweet five million times a year with negative comments about their body and self image. Dove wanted to do something about this and so, built around the Oscars, it launched a campaign to get people to #SpeakBeautiful Any time you campaign around a hashtag you create a risk. The tag…

  • Gaming the reviews

    By Quentin Langley How do you buy a bed? Or a sofa? Or select a hotel or cab company in a city you have never visited? Such occasional or first time purchases require some thought and research. The item may be expensive. Or it may be that you have invested time – your precious vacation…

  • Giuliani’s unhinged attacks on Obama

    By Quentin Langley Let us suppose that you believe – as Rudy Giuliani presumably believes – that President Obama's policies are disastrously wrong for America. There are at least two explanations for the president's preference for such disastrous policies: either he wants the US to fail or he is misguided enough to believe that these…

  • The Williams fiasco

    By Quentin Langley So Brian Williams has taken six months off from his role as managing editor and anchor for NBC.  It was inevitable and I rather doubt he will be coming back. It is very difficult to take seriously his claim that he accidentally "conflated" the memory of being in a helicopter that was…

  • Leave the kids out of it

    By Quentin Langley Elizabeth Lauten has resigned from her job as an aide to a Republican Congressman after making derogatory remarks about Sasha and Malia Obama, the President's teenage daughters. She accused them of lacking class in a Facebook post that, well, lacked class.  It is easy to talk up the political significance of this…

  • When brands collide

    By Quentin Langley Celebrities and politicians have dedicated groups of fans in a way that commerce can only envy. There is a sense of purpose about politics that creates loyalty. You support political causes for a reason, and don't change allegiance for reasons of convenience, only when there is some deeper underlying cause. So, it…

  • An Uber mistake

    By Quentin Langley Threatening journalists is really bad form for a PR professional. It is all about building relationships. The clue is in the name. Emil Michael, of Uber, said that the company could spend a million dollars digging dirt on journalists. Apparently, he did not mean that he was recommending this, merely that it…