Tag Archives | Marketing

Heineken Beer Wants Your Fingerprint

By on April 17, 2012 in News 13

heinekenMore strangeness from this past weekend’s Coachella Festival — within its big green tent, beer-maker Heineken was busy collecting a database of the fingerprints of cold-beer-loving attendees. Marketing reflecting the realities of our era? Via Complex:

Grab up to two cases of green cans and take them to the Heineken Cold Storage Room, where you’ll give your name and have your fingerprint scanned. The Heineken folks tag and store your brew, letting you go catch the next hot set while your beer is chilled to a perfect 34 degrees (this only takes 30 minutes). When you’re ready, pick up your beer—and a rebate for $25 off the purchase of your Coachella ticket.

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The Women Who Named The ‘Big Mac’ Received A Plaque

By on April 13, 2012 in News 10

Big MacHere’s the inside story behind the woman who came up with the name “Big Mac” for McDonald’s. Despite coining what could be the greatest marketing name in history, she never received any money for it. As Alan P. Henry wrote in the Glenview Lantern:

The next time you prepare to chomp into a Big Mac, take a moment first to thank Esther Glickstein Rose of Glenview. She’s the one who named it, and without her dogged persistence, the iconic sandwich may never have become a McDonald’s product.

The story begins 45 years ago on a snowy winter day in downtown Chicago in 1967. With ten dollars to her name, the 17-year-old Von Steuben High School graduate saw an ad for a secretary at McDonald’s corporate headquarters. Poorly dressed and soaking wet from the commute into the LaSalle Street office, she was spotted in a hallway by a company official, who promptly hired her.

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The Right to Sell Kids Junk

By on March 28, 2012 in News 10

Froot-Loops-Cereal-BowlFood critic and blogger extraordinaire Mark Bittman makes the point that a Constitution protecting corporations’ right to inundate children with junk food is wack (especially because the obesity and other health problems it leads to will require health care, which the Constitution may or may not allow the government to provide), in the New York Times:

The First Amendment to the Constitution, which tops our Bill of Rights, guarantees — theoretically, at least — things we all care about. So much is here: freedom of religion, of the press, of speech, the right to assemble and more. Yet it’s stealthily and incredibly being invoked to safeguard the nearly unimpeded “right” of a handful of powerful corporations to market junk food to children.

It’s been reported that kids see an average of 5,500 food ads on television every year (sounds low, when you think about it), nearly all peddling junk. (They may also see Apple commercials, but not of the fruit kind.) Worse are the online “advergames” that distract kids with entertainment while immersing them in a product-driven environment.

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The Campaign For A Commercial-Free Childhood

By on March 16, 2012 in News 3

summerhill (8)I can’t even imagine what a childhood without advertising would be. Boston Magazine writes:

Susan Linn and her tiny but hugely influential nonprofit Boston nonprofit, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, have become a child marketer’s worst nightmare. Just ask Disney, Hasbro, Scholastic, and Kellogg.

The CCFC is concerned with two overlapping issues: the amount of time children spend in front of an ever-growing array of screens — TVs, computers, smartphones, tablets — and the marketing messages they are subjected to while glued to them. Under Linn’s direction, the group has taken on some of the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world. It forced Kellogg to remove SpongeBob SquarePants and other cartoon characters from the packaging of foods that were light on nutritional value. It got Hasbro to shelve plans for a new line of dolls based on the sexpot pop act the Pussycat Dolls (“Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?”).

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Upstate New York’s NXIVM: Marketing Business Or Extreme Cult?

By on February 13, 2012 in News 8

raniereIn the 21st century, combining a brainwashing sex cult with a Ponzi-scheme-esque multilevel marketing company makes perfect sense. The Times Union reports:

In a Saratoga County townhouse complex, a man who wears a Jesus beard and seeks to patent his philosophies keeps a cluster of adoring women at his side. He has drawn more than 10,000 people to his mission of ethical living. But some disciples say he has delivered a much darker reality.

Keith Raniere, a multilevel-marketing businessman turned self-improvement guru, has peddled himself as a spiritual being to followers, most of them women. A close-knit group of these women has tended to him, paid his bills and shuttled him around. Several have satisfied his sexual needs. And a few have left their families behind to wrap him in their affections.

Claiming one of the world’s highest IQs and holding three degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Raniere has evolved over the past two decades from the fresh-faced founder of Consumers’ Buyline Inc., a buying club business investigated for being a pyramid scheme, into the 51-year-old intellectual commander of NXIVM, a Colonie-based company promising followers from Canada to Mexico it can “help transform and, ultimately, be an expression of the noble civilization of humans.”

Raniere has convinced some followers he doesn’t drive because his intellectual energy sets off radar detectors.

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Can’t Pay Your Mortgage? Turn Your House Into An Ad

By on February 13, 2012 in News 19

The latest manifestation of the broken housing market and the thousands of homeowners who can’t afford their mortgage payments is an eye-grabbing advertising scheme from marketing company Brainiacs From Mars. If you let them paint your house like this…

brainiacsfrommarshome

… they’ll pay you up to $2,000 a month. Here’s the deal:

We’re looking for houses to paint. In fact, paint is an understatement. We’re looking for homes to
turn into billboards. In exchange, we’ll pay your mortgage every month for as long as your house remains painted.

Here are a few things we’re looking for. You must own your home. It cannot be rented or leased. We’ll paint the entire outside of the house, minus the roof, the windows and any awnings. Painting will take approximately 3 – 5 days. Your house must remain painted for at least one month and may be extended up to a year. If, for any reason, you decide to cancel after one month or if we cancel the agreement with you, we’ll repaint your house back to the original colors.

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Naming Products Like Babies, And Babies Like Products

By on December 20, 2011 in News 3

siriSlate on how branding names and baby names converged. Are our consumer products becoming our babies, and our babies becoming branded items?

We’ve started naming our kids like products—and our products like kids. Parents approach baby naming a lot like product branding. Whereas in the past, names were typically chosen with an eye toward personal significance (a baby was named after a grandparent, say), today’s parents increasingly focus on the public image projected by the name.

Now, as companies introduce technologies that function like people—Siri being the most extreme example to date—they suddenly find themselves with the same kinds of naming challenges as today’s parents-to-be. They have to consider the complex web of cultural meanings that each name carries. They have to ask, as parents do, “What kind of person are we creating, and what name represents that?”

It’s no coincidence, then, that brand names and baby names have begun to converge, as in the case of the Sienna minivan and baby Siennas.

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Occupy-Themed Best Buy Marketing Campaign

By on November 22, 2011 in News 23

Have you been curious how the Occupy movement would be co-opted? Occupy Best Buy combines the red-hot protest movement with Black Power fist iconography in an effort to get people pumped up about buying plasma screen TVs or whatever it is they sell at Best Buy. Definitely the worst of the occupations to spring up so far. Best Buy claims that no affiliation with the web site, though one would suspect that it’s a viral marketing effort:

occupy… Read the rest

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