Brandjack News
News and commentary around the concept of brandjacking
Category: Uncategorized
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By Quentin Langley Two related stories here. First, the New York Attorney General is to clamp down on search engine optimisation companies which pay people to write fake reviews of products. Second, academic research at MIT and Northwestern suggests that significant numbers of people are writing fake reviews of products for their own reasons. These…
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By Quentin Langley Nestlé – and specifically its Kit Kat brand – was the victim of one of the all-time great brandjacks. Greenpeace used a spoof Kit Kat ad to force the Swiss company to cut Sinar Mas out of its supply chain. Now Kit Kat has produced a video of almost equal quality. In…
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By Quentin Langley This blog is a cynic about the IhateRyanair blog. On the whole it reinforces Ryanair's key message of being stingy and therefore cheap. Every story about Ryanair firing staff for stealing electricity by charging mobile phones at work certainly makes people think that the airline is mean, but a little voice at…
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By Quentin Langley An interesting battle here, which Coke probably doesn't need to fight. It has started using print ads to defend the reputation of aspartame, a widely used and entirely safe chemical which critics claim causes cancer. Aspartame is a sweetener used in place of sugar in low or zero calorie drinks. It…
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By Quentin Langley Pew Research has done some fascinating research on the bias of US TV news coverage. View it for yourself, but here are my takeaways from it: No surprise here, but MSNBC is by far the most biased of the channels. Liberals complain about Fox, but there is really no comparison. Both in…
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By Quentin Langley Newspapers have generally been a pretty good way of blowing a fortune. Apart from a brief flirtation with profitability following an agressive pricing policy in the 1990s, The Times has been losing money for well over a century. Rich men have become a great deal less rich by 'investing' in newspapers. Among…
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By Quentin Langley At the weekend a Papa John's customer in Florida posted a video on YouTube of playing back a message left on his voicemail by a delivery driver. As best anyone can reconstruct, the driver accidentally redialled the customer's number after delivering the pizza and is complaining to other people that the customer…
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By Quentin Langley Anthony Weiner has been a tough and effective congressman, and there is no doubt he would have been one of the leading contenders for Mayor of New York if it hadn’t been for the little incident on Twitter. While many thought his career was over at that time, he seems to take…
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By Quentin Langley I do not wish to be insensitive to Tila Tequila, a reality TV star who has had addiction problems and was hospitalised after an apparent suicide attempt, but her advisers need to keep her away from YouTube. The problem is, any idiot with a computer or a phone can upload stuff to…
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