Last week Purina’s Tidy Cats launched a “No More PU” billboard campaign with the intent to start conversations about things in life that stink (#lifestinks). The campaign, which was also meant to be funny, rubbed people the wrong way in Cincinnati, when a billboard in Over-The-Rhine read: “You’re so over Over-The-Rhine. #lifestinks nomorepu.com”.
Insulted and very angry (rightly so), Cincinnati residents took to Twitter. Tidy Cats issued apologies to complaints and by Thursday night, the ad was covered up with a billboard promoting Purina pet adoption.
Tidy Cats, good effort at being quick to try and correct this, but for many the damage is already done. We love OTR and this campaign was #notfunny.
Many young girls today are growing up touting their look-alike American Girls dolls, playing dress up with them, and visiting the American Girls Store to eat, shop, visit the hair salon, and get a check up at the doctor. For the most part these dolls are wholesome and a seemingly innocent companion for little girls.
This wholesome image is being (creepily) disturbed by a stream of editorial photos in which girls pose with their dolls. The second photo on the album pictures a young girl, no more than 11 or 12, laying in a promiscuous pose, and wearing a skimpy bikini with her doll on a balcony that totes a city scene view. Due to the inappropriate content of the photos Welt will not be reposting them on our blog.
Note: these images are photographed by Ilonia Szwarc and is represented by Redux Pictures — the company that does American Girls editorials.
In our opinion, the dolls (and the little girls who own them) are, unfortunately, represented poorly in these images and do not represent an innocent or wholesome image for fans (and hopefully their parents).
We feel that these pictures are:
1. Not a positive look for American Girls;
2. Do not represent the company well;
3. Are exploiting younger girls;
4. Are extremely inappropriate;
5. …What were they thinking?!
Our top 10 tweets #frompopcultureandmarketing of the week:
Social Media expert and Welt alumn, Jay Kulpa, comments on Google yawning fact - did it make you yawn too?
Controversial: employers have been asking potential employees to give up their Facebook password. Twitter is where Welt heard it first!
#Perezism = Perez Hilton giving (not so bad) advice or inspiration.
We missed the #cincySM event, but we were able to follow it on Twitter (thanks to the avid tweeters.)
Makes a good point... It's easy to forget, but sometimes the simple stuff goes a long way!
Fun fact
Visual aids - such as inforgraphics - really help to put something into perspective.
We like OTR and Arts, so we couldn't help but add this to the list.
While the brawl that got this coverage in the NYTimes isn't ideal, it does reflect one thing we think that makes Cincinnati great: the basketball teams, who both seemingly have rebounded since their fight.
One brand that might not be too excited about Shawne Merriman's comical response to the NFL's bounty scandal: P&G's Bounty Towels.
Bonus tweet:
Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning fund Airtime, which is a live social video company.
Which tweets were your favorite? Did we miss any? Hit us back!
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Connect with our LinkedIn group at Welt Branding: Challenge Everything
The SXSW is an annual festival for film, music, and interactive gatherers. The 2012 SXSW festival, packed with tech hungry attendees, journalists, and bloggers, takes place March 9-18, hallowing over 20,000 visitors to Austin, Texas. Simple supply and demand economics yield that when 20,000 internet junkies congregate at one event, Wi-Fi bandwidth becomes a scarcity.
So it comes as no surprise that a project called “Homeless Hotspots” beta-test coincided with this year’s festival. The project turns Austin’s homeless into 4G hotspots for SXSW attendees to use. No joke. This is part marketing, part charity, part innovative, part very cool, part exploitive, and mostly very controversial.
Image taken from Discovery News article "Homeless People Are Wi-Fi Hot Spots at SXSW" by Nic Halverson
How do you know the person is a hotspot and what’s the cost?
They are uniformed in a T-shirt that reads, “I’m (name here), a 4G hotspot, SMS HH (name here) to 25827 for access.” A minimum donation of $2 for 15 minutes of Wi-Fi usage, though users can donate as much as they want. (One hundred percent of these donations go directly to the homeless participant you are using as a 4G hotspot. Participants are also paid $20/day.)
Seneel Radia, BBH NY’s director of innovation, explains that homeless individuals who hand out newspapers inspired the project; it helps to shift their newspaper sales into the digital age. Homeless participants are thankful for the monetary opportunity, but are most excited about the value of possibly changing stereotypical perceptions towards the homeless.
Last Sunday Cartier aired a 3 ½ minute long commercial on three major networks: CBS, ABC, and NBC. This was a major shift in marketing dollars for the luxury retailer, as its previous media placement spend has been mostly allocated to magazine advertisements.
So, why the sudden shift to $3 million TV commercial placements?
When live TV commercials were first introduced in the 1940s, the commercials ran at 60 second spots and eventually decreased to the more modern 15 second time spots. Today, these 15 second spots enable most TV advertisements to be creatively short. They usually highlight value and benefits and are ultimately all versions of one another, at least within each industry. Many are lacking in differentiation and consumer appeal.
Recently, however, there have been a number of retailers, including Chipotle and Gap Inc., that have caught sight of this redundancy. They shifted strategy and instead opted to create multi-minute long TV commercials. Not only are these advertisements enormously longer than competitors, but as a consequence they tend to “roadblock” competitors from airing during the same sitcom.
The most recent contender, Cartier, debuted its new commercial on Sunday night. The debut appropriately aired during “The Good Wife”, “Celebrity Apprentice”, and “Desperate Housewives” sitcoms, all with demographics akin to that of Cartier’s target audience. Their commercial placement is of heightened importance because Cartier needed to not only grasp and hold consumer attention span for minutes longer, but also ensure that the many more dollars invested in capturing the extra time have a valuable return.
