In reaction to public outcry over Swiffer's use of iconic feminist image Rosie the Riveter, who, in a 1943 Westinghouse Electric ad campaign, urged women to get out of the kitchen and work during World War II, the brand has issued an apology and promised to remove the image from its website.
The image appeared on the brand's Swiffer website and in ads promoting Swiffer's steam cleaner.
Of the brand's seemingly incomprehensible reasoning behind using the image, Boing Boin Publisher Jason Weisberger said, "I love the clear tribute to an important historical image done in such a way as to piss on its legacy."
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In reaction to social media outrage over McDonald's discontinuing its Angus Third Pounder burger line, Carl's Jr and Hardee's CEO Andy Puzder offered his sympathy to McDonald's customers in an open letter that ran in USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. Coming to the aid of disgruntled and distraught McDonald's diners, Puzder is offering people a $1 off coupon for Carl's Jr.'s and Hardee's' 100% Black Angus Six Dollar Burger. The coupon can be downloaded at ReclaimYourAngus.
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It's fairly evident there's a tectonic shift going on in the workplace today. From telecommuting to collaboration to cloud-based workflows, everything is changing. So what's a marketer supposed to do in the face of all this change?
Thankfully, there are experts on this topic who can help guide you and your company through these changes. In this Central Desktop eBook, to which I contributed, you will learn how these changes are affecting marketing organizations, why the remote workplace is growing in importance, how telecommuting can actually give your company a competitive edge, how agencies and marketers are reinventing their creative teams to meet these changes and why collaboration is becoming an integral component of successful companies.
Download the eBook now and stay ahead of the curve.
If you're a marketer placing sponsored content (also known as native advertising) with a publisher -- or a publisher accepting sponsored content -- there are a few things you should know about how Google News, and Google in general, views this particular form of content.
In a recent blog post, Google Senior Director of News and Social Products Richard Gingras wrote:
"Credibility and trust are longstanding journalistic values, and ones which we all regard as crucial attributes of a great news site. It's difficult to be trusted when one is being paid by the subject of an article, or selling or monetizing links within an article. Google News is not a marketing service, and we consider articles that employ these types of promotional tactics to be in violation of our quality guidelines ... if we learn of promotional content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News."
Hmm...
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Yesterday, the marketing world was up in arms over Nutella sending a cease and desist to the brand's biggest fan, Sara Rosso. Seven years ago, Rosso created World Nutella Day which now has 40,000 followers on Facebook. Nutella claimed the page was an unauthorized use of their intellectual property and trademarks.
Oh how quickly the tide turns for brands when they realize lawyers are clueless and consumers run the show. Following the kerfuffle, Nutella has dropped its cease and desist order and issued an apologetic statement to Italian news site Corriere della Sera which the Huffington Post translated:
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You would think that after all these years of highly publicized social media screw ups and popular SXSW panels that highlight such screw ups, brands would finally get the message; Don't be a jackass and alienate your biggest fans.
Sadly, it seems there will always be an idiot in the mix. This time it's Italy-based Ferrero SpA, parent company to Nutella, a hazelnut spread loved by many The brand sent a cease and desist to Sara Rosso, founder of World Nutella Day, a 7-year-old event and organization that is all about the love of Nutella.
Rosso launched World Nutella Day in 2007 to "celebrate Italy's edible treasure with online and offline tributes." The event's Facebook page has 40,000 likes.
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Last Friday, the brilliantly insightful Corey Eridon of HubSpot castigated P&G for calling their "Facebook experiment" a failure and for the brand's complete misunderstanding of digital strategy.
In response to the assumption it's somehow Facebook's fault P&G fell on its face and had to lay off 6,250 employees, Eridon wrote, "Yes, it's Facebook's fault. It's not P&G's fault for failing to stay on top of digital trends like learning what EdgeRank is and how it works. It's not P&G's fault for relying on third-party assets to build their brand, instead of investing in assets they can control, like their own website and blog. It's not P&G's fault for failing to create remarkable content that -- and if you know how EdgeRank works you'd know this -- gets you more visibility on Facebook due to reader engagement. It's not P&G's fault for failing to realize no audience is guaranteed, paid or otherwise, and that audiences are actually earned on a daily basis. And it's certainly not P&G's fault for expecting a "new" platform like Facebook to work by slapping on the same old-school ad tactics they've been using (and, based on their rampant layoffs, not using well) for decades."
Whoo! It's like you can visualize Eridon in a cage match schooling an army of P&G mascots on how shit gets done in today's world of digital marketing.
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Get a load of this insanity. Mondelez, that packaged goods company all the social media whiz kids love so much because it's behind Oreo, has now decided it will take 120 days to pay agencies and other suppliers. And get a load of this buzzword-laden bullshit a Modelez stament gives as reason for the move:
"We're continually looking to drive efficiency and improve our processes on a global basis. Extending our payment terms allows us to better align with industry and make sure we compete on fair grounds, while simultaneously improving transparency and predictability of payment processes."
Um, what?
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On a tiny island island outside Finland called Aland where, reportedly, nothing interesting ever happens, a gaming company, Paf, placed a help wanted ad looking for a seer. Now, we hope they aren't hiring this this future teller to game the system. Rather, we hope, like any well-run business, they'd just like the ability to predict how their business will be doing in, say the next year, five for ten.
Apparently, there are a lot of clairvoyants in Aland as the company tells us they have received hundreds of applications.
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Oh have we got something fun for you! It's a little bit Mad Men and a little bit Google Glass. What would happen if iconic ad campaigns like VW's Think Small, Clairol's Does She or Doesn't She, Keep America Beautiful's Crying Indian, Wendy's Where's the Beef and Brooke Shield's sexually-suggestive Calvin Klein campaigns were to play out today?
Working with HubSpot's Shannon Johnson, I co-authored a report entitled Traditional Turned Inbound: Re-imagining 5 Iconic Ad Campaigns From the Past. But first, let's be honest. While I came up with the five campaigns, reached out to the industry for comment and took a stab and re-imagining the campaigns, it was the brilliant Shannon Johnson who brought this report to life with uber-intelligent insight on how these iconic campaigns from yesteryear would play out in today's very different media landscape.
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