Weight Watchers Endorses McDonalds
How to destroy your brand fast! As reported in the Guardian:
McDonald’s is hardly an ideal dining location for anyone struggling to stay slim. But the fast food chain scored a PR coup today when Weight Watchers agreed to endorse some of its products in New Zealand – a move met with outrage by nutritionists and obesity experts.
As part of the deal, which the company says is the first of its kind in the world, McDonald’s will use the Weight Watchers logo on its menu boards and Weight Watchers will promote McDonald’s to dieters.
The link-up is the fast-food chain’s latest attempt to improve its reputation by securing endorsements. In January, to the horror of gastronomes, Italy’s agriculture minister, Luca Zaia, helped launch the McItaly range of burgers. For a representative of…
Campbell Soup’s Neuromarketing
Who knew neuromarketing even existed? I won’t be buying any Campbell’s soup for a while, that’s for sure. From the Wall Street Journal:
The bowls are getting bigger and steamier, but the soup spoons are going away.
Those are among the biggest changes Campbell Soup Co. is making in decades to the iconic labels and shelf displays of its condensed soups—the company’s biggest single business, with more than $1 billion in sales.
The changes—expected to be announced Wednesday—will culminate a two-year effort by Campbell to figure out how to get consumers to buy more soup. Condensed soup has been a slow-growing category in which budget-conscious consumers have little tolerance for price increases.
In the hunt for a better connection with consumers, Campbell Soup Co. is relying on new neuromarketing studies to guide the redesign of its condensed-soup packaging. The research looks at psysiological responses — such as perspiration and increased heart rate — to marketing…
Are Buzz Agents Among Us?
Christine Loman writing for Buzzsaw:
In the summer of 2001, 40 beautiful women whispered “save me” into the ears of men in San Francisco, dropped business cards into their pockets and promptly disappeared. The question, “Is it just a game?” was found scrawled in red lipstick on bathroom mirrors. Men dressed in black suits and dark sunglasses stood on the corners of busy streets during rush hour with cardboard signs that read, “The truth is majestic” and “They are watching you.” The bottoms of donut boxes sent to office buildings read, “Who feeds you your information?”
All were part of an advertising campaign mirroring the content of a new video game called Majestic. The brainchild of San Francisco-based Ammo Marketing, the campaign succeeded in generating press and users to Majestic. Part of this success, according to Martin Howard, author of We Know What You Want: How They Change Your Mind, may have been due to the use of buzz agents in the campaign.
Why ‘Avatar’ is Actually the 26th Biggest Movie of All Time
I’m not saying it’s rank won’t increase, but here’s an interesting point from The Live Feed:
Boxoffice is arguably more straightforward to report than TV ratings. You have this weekly Top 10 list of returns, you compare each movie to the other movies. TV ratings are a murky swamp where one network’s hit is another network’s flop and context is not just a factor, but often the entire story.
Han fucking soloYet one respect in which boxoffice reporting is pretty odd — emphasizing ticket grosses yet rarely mentioning ticket sales. That would be like always reporting how many ad dollars sold off Lost and not mentioning the number of viewers that actually watched the show. With everybody reporting how Avatar is The Biggest Movie of All Time based on grosses ($1.859 billion and counting), it’s important to remember how rising ticket prices skew the returns.
Here’s the Top 10 movies of all time … by number of tickets sold:
1. “Gone With the Wind” (1939) 202,044,600
2. “Star Wars” (1977) 178,119,600
3. “The Sound of Music” (1965) 142,415,400
4. “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982) 141,854,300
5. “The Ten Commandments” (1956) 131,000,000
6. “Titanic” (1997) 128,345,900
7. “Jaws” (1975) 128,078,800
8. “Doctor Zhivago” (1965) 124,135,500
9. “The Exorcist” (1973) 110,568,700
10. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) 109,000,000
Naomi Klein: How Corporate Branding Has Taken Over the U.S. Government
Naomi Klein writes in the Guardian:
Ten years after the publication of No Logo, Naomi Klein switches her attention from the mall to Barack Obama and discovers that corporate culture has taken over the US government.
In May 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited edition line called “Absolut No Label”. The company’s global public relations manager, Kristina Hagbard, explained that “For the first time we dare to face the world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to manifest the idea that no matter what’s on the outside, it’s the inside that really matters.”
A few months later, Starbucks opened its first unbranded coffee shop in Seattle, called 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea. This “stealth Starbucks” (as the anomalous outlet immediately became known) was decorated with “one-of-a-kind”…
Backlash Over UK Plan to Extend TV Advertising
Denis Campbell and Polly Curtis write in the Guardian:
Ministers are facing fierce opposition from medical groups, teaching unions and children’s charities over plans to allow products to be used in television programmes for marketing purposes for the first time.
Critics claim the move, which broadcasters say will give them up to £140m a year in extra revenue, will fuel childhood obesity, exacerbate the problems caused by alcohol and gambling, and distort storylines by rewarding programme makers for deliberately giving certain items high visibility.
The British Medical Association has written to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) strongly opposing the plan. “The BMA is deeply concerned about the decision to allow any form of product placement in relation to alcohol, gambling and foods high in fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) as…
Buy Your Very Own Robot Doppelganger!
That man’s robot doppelganger looks very confused … Good god, man! What have you done to him?! Posted on Pink Tenacle, (creepy…):
Department store operator Sogo & Seibu has announced plans to sell two humanoid robots custom-built to look like the people who purchase them.
Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro with his robot double — Roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro already got his.
The mechanical doppelgangers are available for a limited time as part of a special New Year’s promotional sale at Sogo, Seibu, and Robinson’s department stores. They will be built by Japanese robotics firm Kokoro, which is perhaps best known for its line of Actroid receptionist humanoids.
In addition to providing the robot with the owner’s face, body, hair, eyes and eyelashes, Kokoro will model the robot’s facial expressions and upper body movements after the buyer.…
Why Those Hamburgers You See On TV Look So Damn Good…
A segment from the 1990 series, “Buy Me That: Kids and Advertising”, created by HBO in a collaboration with Consumer Reports Television. In this clip, we’ll meet a “makeup artist for food” who surprises us all with this behind-the-scenes look at how burgers (and fries) are made to look their best for television…
Mommy Bloggers or Corporate Shills?
P.J. Huffstutter and Jerry Hirsch writes in the LA Times:
On most days, Andrea Deckard can be found in her home office, digging through stacks of coupons and grocery receipts for money saving tips and recipes that she can share with readers of her Mommy Snacks blog.
That is, when the stay-at-home mom isn’t being wined and dined by giant food companies. Earlier this year, Frito-Lay flew her to Los Angeles to meet celebrities such as model Brooke Burke and the Spice Girls’ Mel B, while pitching her on its latest snack ad campaign.
More recently, Nestle paid to put her and 16 other so-called “mommy bloggers” — and one daddy blogger — up at the posh Langham Huntington hotel in Pasadena, treated them to a private show at the Magic Castle in Hollywood and sent packages of frozen Omaha Steaks to their families to tide them over while the women were away learning all about the company’s latest product lines.
In return, Deckard and her virtual sisterhood filed Twitter posts raving about Nestle’s canned pumpkin, Wonka candy and Juicy Juice drinks.
“People have accused us of being corporate shills,” said Deckard, a Monroe, Ohio, mother of three whose junkets have also included a free trip to Frito-Lay’s Texas headquarters. Deckard, noting that she is up front with her readers about such trips, said they are educational for her and her fans, and “just fun.”
Besides, she added, “it’s not like I sold my soul for a chocolate bar.”
How to Sell an Apocalypse
It surely hasn’t escaped the attention of any regular reader of this site that The Disinformation Company has produced a documentary film about the 2012 phenomenon. Among others starring in our film are Daniel Pinchbeck, Lawrence E. Joseph and John Major Jenkins. About 10 months ago Sony Pictures asked us to urgently overnight a copy of our film to their marketing team in Culver City, CA in connection with the Roland Emmerich 2012 disaster film that they were already working on. We never heard another peep out of them, but I suspect they agreed with our choice of experts. As this New York Magazine article reports, Pinchbeck, Joseph and Jenkins were the 2012-ologists at a fancy 2012 movie launch event, and it seems that they did us proud:
In the Cottonwood Ballroom at the Four Seasons in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the New York neo-shaman Daniel Pinchbeck sipped Fiji water and prepared to discuss the end of the world. The Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012, and Pinchbeck has built a multiplatform enterprise on the notion that something drastic will happen on that date—maybe…
