Brandjack News

News and commentary around the concept of brandjacking

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  • Ryanair faces safety challenge

    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 the back of minds always adds "no wonder they are so cheap". This is probably why Michael O'Leary gave the blog a mass of free publicity by taking it to court.

    But challenges on safety issues are more serious. If people believe Ryanair flights are less safe than other airlines it might hit sales. It probably shouldn't. If Ryanair is the most dangerous airline in Europe (and I know of no evidence that it is) then it is stil much safer than a train journey, let alone travelling by car.

    Channel Four's Dispatches programme has criticised the airline and the left-wing blog Sum of Us has taken up the issue. IhateRyanair is also running with the safety issue, as opposed to its normal generic hatred. 

    If the safety issue is going to take off, it is going to take more than a few posts on hate sites. There is going to have to be actual evidence of risks – and the risks will probably have to be measurably higher than with other airlines. Even then boycotting Ryanair would still be irrational for anyone who drives a car or travels by train. But unlike blogs about Ryanair mistreating its staff or serving poor food – let alone charging for the toilet, a rumour Ryanair started itself – the safety issue could cut both ways for the airline, and discourage as many customers as it recruits. 

  • Coke takes on aspartame critics

    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 seems unlikely that Coke is going to talk around its critics. People who have rejected the results of peer-reviewed studies are not likely to be persuaded by a print ad from Coke. There may be some persuadables, but a high profile campaign such as this will raise doubts with people who have never heard the scare stories. 

    It would be better, I would think, to focus on the power of story-telling. For example, they could produce a film about the advantages of diet drinks, with stories from people who have lost weight. Excessive weight, of course, is a genuine health risk. They could drop in testimony from the scientists who have done the peer-reviewed studies as part of telling the wider story. 

    Check out the article in Ad Week for more details but, in particular, read the comments. I was expecting the religious fervour of Coke's critics and, especially, the moronic over-use of exclamation marks and writing the word 'chemical' in upper case letters, to just prove that it causes cancer. I was a bit more surprised by the similar fervour showed by Coke's supporters:

    You're the liar what you have said about Coke is a lie and smear without facts or proof. Coke has never told a lie there [sic] always right. Pepsi sucks they have always sucked plus it make's you ill unlike Coke which is the real thing.

  • Fascinating stats on US TV news bias

    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:

    1. 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 the balance of tone (pro Obama and anti Romney) and in the percentage of news that has tone, this is battle isn't even close.
    2. Again, no surprise here, but Fox has a conservative bias and CNN and ABC both have a clear (though slightly smaller) liberal bias.
    3. It is slightly surprising – to me, at any rate – that the coverage on CBS and NBC (main channel) seems, at first glance, to be so close to balance. Overall they are as negative about Obama as Romney.
    4. A deeper dive tells a different story. The three networks (this includes ABC with its much clearer liberal bias) were tough on Obama in the morning, but pro-Obama in the evening. They were anti-Romney in the morning, but much more strongly so in the evening. In other words they saved their most pro-Obama and most anti-Romney coverage for the much more influential evening bulletins. It is a rather subtle, but probably effective liberal bias. 

    I wonder if the difference between morning and evening coverage is uniform across the networks, or is heavily slanted by one of them. It would be also interesting to know if this is a policy by the networks, or is a coincidence of editorial appointments.

  • Why do rich people buy newspapers?

    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 the possible reasons, I suppose:

    • It is probably an ego boost for people like Robert Maxwell to put themselves on the front page.
    • It may enable people to push a political agenda or to advance other business interests.
    • It may enhance the power of a business portfolio, boosting the profitability of other brands sufficiently to make up for the losses.
    • They may imagine they have a new business strategy that will make the newspaper profitable.

    Which of these apply to Jeff Bezos, the purchaser of the venerable Washington Post? He is not someone who has tried to make himself the story. His personal profile is much lower than that of his business, Amazon. I doubt we will be seeing front page stories about how amazing he is. Bezos has some interest in political issues. He made a large donation to boosting the cause of gay marriage in Washington (state, not DC). His donations to political candidates, however, have infrequent, modest and split betweent the parties. He has donated more frequently to Democrats, but also to a couple of Republican senators. Mostly, but not exclusively, the donations have been to candidates in Washington state. Despite his passion for gay marriage and space flight, he has shown no great desire to be a player in national politics before. 

    Could this be about boosting Amazon? Possibly, I suppose, but it is notable that the Post has been bought by Bezos and not by Amazon. He doesn't seem to be planning to integrate the businesses.

    Could he have a new business model in mind for newspapers? That does seem possible. He is the person who has revolutionised the sale of books. Newspapers have already been experimenting with all sorts of revenue models. Has Bezos got something new in mind? Or is it merely that he has deep enough pockets to keep the Post afloat until the revenue models reach maturity?

  • The top Greenpeace Brandjacks

    By Quentin Langley

    Greenpeace – the most effective group of brandjackers in the world – has started to use the term. In a first class blog by Cassady Sharp, the group gives a run down on its best brandjacks, and there are some there I need to explore.

    Cassady has included some great examples, but I cannot agree with her rank order. For me, the Ken & Barbie campaign stands out. There is no doubt that Give the Orangutan a Break was extremely creative for its time, and there is a huge depth of research that has gone into Arctic Ready, but the way Greenpeace integrated its use of YouTube, Twitter, and its traditional offline stunts (such as scaling the Mattel building) leaves Ken and Barbie well ahead of the others. It also shows brilliant use of narrative. They got Barbie arrested, for goodness sake!

  • Papa John’s in racist deliverer row

    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 is a bad tipper then constructs a song containing a racial epithet which he sings to The Marriage of Figaro. The driver associates the bad tipping with the customer's race. 

    YouTube has removed the video, so I cannot embed it on this blog. I could include a link to elsewhere on the web, and you can certainly track it down if you like. There seem to be two possible problems with embedding it here anyway. One is that it contains offensive language. We could get around that by posting a warning and saying don't play it if you don't want to hear the language. But the video also prominently displays the phone number of the driver. That seems to be why YouTube took it down as it is in breach of the site's policy on promoting harassment. Tough one, isn't it? The driver was plainly in the wrong, but should that leave him open to harassment? The site on which I viewed the video had hundreds of thousands of views and almost six thousand comments. Scanning down the page it included people on all sides. Most wanted to boycott Papa John's. A few defended the comments. Several advocated harassment or violence against the driver.

    Papa John's has handled the situation about as well as it could. The local branch has confirmed that the incident is genuine and that the driver has been dismissed. The CEO has made a personal statement of apology to the customer and dissociated the company from the driver's behaviour.

    This is going to be a big and growing issue for businesses. Individual staff members are going to do things which damage the reputation of the business, and companies (and other organisations) are going to have to handle issues like this.

  • Weiner rides again

    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 the view that it is not and that he still has a chance in a mayoral election that has yet to come alive.

    Here’s his annoncement:

     

     

    He faces several key barriers, and simply saying that he has made a lot of mistakes is unlikely to be enough to dispel them. To remind you, briefly, of his problem, he accidently tweeted a photograph of himself in his underpants in what was supposed to be a dm to a much younger woman.

    The first barrier with some voters should be, and probably is, the smallest: he was flirting with a much younger woman, and thus displaying disloyalty to his wife.

    Secondly, he lied and lied about it, initially claiming that his Twitter account had been hacked. 

    Thirdly, the nature of his disloyalty to his wife exposes him to some ridicule. Might it undermine New York’s reputation to elect a man ridiculous?

    This should be an interesting campaign.

     

  • PR strategy: Keep crazy celebs off YouTube

    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 the web. A great many idiots do. It makes it much harder for the handlers of celebrity idiots to prevent their clients doing something foolish.

    In this video you will see her showing off her superpowers by creating energy balls out of thin air:

     

     

    If you struggled through this cringeworthy drivel to the end you will have noticed Tila insisting that the effects you can see where not photoshopped on afterwards. (As a nitpick, she means cgi, not photoshop). That she feels the need to say this suggests she really believes that other people can see the light show she has – presumably with chemical assistance – conjured in her head.

    Is it possible that she posted this knowing that it would gather some comment and controversy? People who are famous for being famous do have to keep upping the stakes to remain in the public eye. That seems unlikely. At this point, the video has had 245,000 views whereas some of Tequila’s music videos have had several million. As long as she has an actual music career, this sort of craziness is likely to hurt her reputation rather than enhance it.

  • Child abuse campaign designs ad only visible to children

    By Quentin Langley

    A Spanish campaign group has developed an ad which displays a different image to adults and children. Strictly speaking, it shows different messages according to the angle at which it is viewed and therefore different images to people according to whether they are taller or shorter than 5’4″.

    Adults see a child with a sad face and the message “sometimes abuse is only visible to the child suffering it” while children see a child with bruises and other marks on his face and a message about calling a helpline.

    Neatly done.

     

  • Anti-gun group starts anti-Starbucks campaign

    By Quentin Langley

    A group calling itself National Gun Victims (sic) Action Council has launched a campaign to boycott Starbucks. It will be the group's first economic target.

    The basis of this campaign is that in states with open-carry laws any property owner can post a sign saying that the property is a gun free zone in which people are not allowed to carry guns. In some states this has the force of law, and people can lose their licences for breaching the policy. Such gun-free zones include the cinema in Aurora, Colorado, and all schools in Connecticut, such as Sandy Hook Elementary. Starbucks does not choose to post such notices. According to the National Gun Victims (sic) Action Council this means that the coffee chain "aggressively support (sic)the NRA’s Pro-Gun Agenda".

    Interesting development. The amateurish punctuation, syntax and logic does not necessarily mean the group should not be taken seriously.