This week Greenpeace posted a gruesome anti-Nestlé commercial on YouTube complaining that Nestlé SA buys palm oil from companies destroying the Indonesian rain forests in order to plant oil palms.

The 60-second video depicts a bored office worker enjoying a Kit Kat, which rather than being the popular chocolate-hazelnut ladyfinger-style confection, appears to be a chocolate-covered ape finger. As he munches on the treat, it oozes blood over his chin and across his keyboard, shocking his co-workers. “Have a break?” reads the on-screen text. “Give the orangu-tan a break.”
<The Globe & Mail>

Fewer than  1,000 people had viewed the video, which supported the appearance of a hand-full of protesters who paraded in front of the Croydon headquarters of Nestlé U.K. They wore orangutan costumes and carried signs that had the word “Killer” executed in the familiar red-on-white Kit Kat font…and they went away.

Then Nestle’s legal and social media team made things worse.

Continued

World traveler Jay Ratcliffe sent this one in from the Las Vegas airport.

Imagine seeing this ad just after TSA screeners have taken your nail clippers and liquids in containers of >3oz. Who at the airport doesn’t from time to time feel a the need for a machine gun, at least for a brief rental.

Where else could you imagine this ad also being posted? The Department of Motor Vehicles?  Maybe the post office?  Isn’t anywhere the disgruntled gather is a natural place to advertise machine gun rental?

The Internet is much more than a network of computers.

It is an endless web of people. Men and women from every corner of the globe are connecting to one another, thanks to the biggest social interface ever known to humanity.

Digital culture has laid the foundations for a new kind of society. And this society is advancing dialogue, debate and consensus through communication. Because democracy has always flourished where there is openness, acceptance, discussion and participation.

And contact with others has always been the most effective antidote against hatred and conflict.

That’s why the Internet is a tool for peace. With it anyone who uses it can sow the seeds of non-violence.

And that’s why the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to the Net.

According to the New York Post, actress Lindsay Lohan is suing E-Trade for $100 million for pain and suffering caused by their Super Bowl ad.

The semi-funny (and non-compelling) ad shows a milkaholic baby named Lindsay (or Lindsey) with a guilty looking baby-husband. Yes, the ad is pretty terrible; so is the legal claim. However, so much passes for online defamation lately, it is unwise to laugh this off entirely.

Lohan’s lawyer, Stephanie Ovadia, stakes out a wafer-thin claim of Personal Publicity.

“Many celebrities are known by one name only, and E-Trade is using that knowledge to profit…They used the name Lindsay as a parody of her life. Why didn’t they use the name Susan?  This is a subliminal message. Everybody’s talking about it and saying it’s Lindsay Lohan.”

If this line of complaint was allowed to stand, just imagine the case members of the Kennedy family would have against The Simpsons over Mayor Quimby. A cultural reference isn’t use of personal publicity, and a lucky judge in Nassau County will get to hold forth on this.

PETA’s Tiger Woods ad is a better case for the Right of Personal Publicity.

Ouch!

Remember my 2010 prediction that brand holders should beware of clowns? I called it the Coulrophobia Epidemic of 2010.  

Logorama did it with trademarks, and won an Oscar.

Girl Talk did it with music, gaining top rankings from Rolling Stone, Blender and Time magazine.

And now Eric Faden uses the most copyrighted video anywhere, Disney® cartoons, both to explain and to demonstrate the reality of “fair use” in documentary film making. It takes the works of “the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms” and uses them to argue against longer copyrights and attacks on fair use.

To paraphrase Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “They are using their power of Free Speech, simply to demonstrate it exists.“

Be sure to read the opening copyright un-warning; this is provocation, parody and education from the very start.

McDonald’s® must be smarting from Logorama’s use of Ronald McDonald as a Pulp Fiction-like gunman. Now Disney has its cartoon catalog used to speak against it in a creative and highly defensible way.

Continued

Last night, a 16-minute animated film, entirely populated by trademarks as both characters and props, won an upset Academy Award. Its producer, Nicolas Schmerkin, explains:

It’s about the way we live and the way we react to these logos. The brain can register 14 logos in less than one second. Making the logos characters with sets and props is about what we’re living … They’re used for what they are.

Logorama is festooned with trademark and copyright questions, right down to the Shapard Fairey “OBEY” street art in the background on a scene. During my time with trademark research firm Thomson CompuMark, we used to see how many trademarks we could spot in different environments. This film is that game wrapped up as a somewhat violent film that asks the question, “Aren’t we all products too?”

You can watch it for free on the Logorama website or buy it for $2 from iTunes.

Trademarks are, after all, romance.  And here, they (along with tremendous imagination) are the whole show.

The Hitler Downfall meme is everywhere (we’ve already covered copyright issues of the Hitler Downfall video).

This weekend, the New York Times even published a primer on making your own version of the scene, in which der Führer’s fury at the collapse of his plans can be translated into the latest pop-culture news.

Bob Battle’s Virginia DUI Lawyer blog credits Seattle DUI defense attorneys at Cowan Kirk Gaston for extending this to lawyer advertising.  It’s another example of law firms trying out social media.

I don’t think of this as an ad, or even necessarily as marketing. It more like a law firm taking part in public dialog, and using a meme to its own ends.

INTA, the International Trademark Association, is a group of nearly six thousand trademark professionals in 190 countries.  They protect the world’s brands.

They’re being Twitter-squatted.  There’s no pretty way to say it.

In 2007, someone apparently seized their name as a Twitter handle and posted one five letter word, “srrrr”.

This looks like a case of first-mover advantage again trumping mark holder in social media.

So what’s the lesson here: that squatting can happen to anyone, anywhere; that Twitter is tough; or that someone needs to drink their INTA juice?

Bad advertising is the fun pause that refreshes here on UsefulArts.

On our previous bad advertising safaris, we’ve:

1. Found the the worst law firm ad ever, and helped get it pulled down.
2. Treated the airport as a museum of misfit ads.
3. Pointed out that UPS has a pretty bad tagline.
4. Chronicled the offensive or silly use of President Obama’s image (you be the judge).

Our fifth ad advertising foray takes us to the grocery store.  Some of the finest talents in consumer-packaged goods design and manage Kellogg’s cereal boxes. The cereal aisle is tough, because it is hyper-competitive, and because the packages must connect with adults and kids with radically different (and often preposterous) value propositions.

Kellogg’s Rice Krispies and Fruit Loops Aspire to Pharma Aisle

Does Rice Krispies really help my child’s immunity more than, say, fresh fruit?  And though Froot Loops now provides fiber, isn’t it still loaded with crap that most adults wouldn’t intentionally feed to their kids?  What’s a better source of fiber: “Fruit” or “Froot”? Go ahead, pick any froot.

And (for any Kellogg’s staff now joining us) good job on including the vitamin source of your antioxidants, as required by the FDA, in a way that makes it look like an additional nutritional claim. Poetry in packaging persists.

Kellogg’s Soylent Green, Now With More Girls!

Wieneke’s first law of advertising is to avoid associating your product with death.

Perhaps a derivative of this should be not associating food products with illness. Somewhere, a brand manager loved this wacky retro game enough to willingly put a cartoon of a sick person on their package, and the giant word “Operation” across its top.

Isn’t Operation a game where you win by pulling parts out of a patient’s body?
Look at the man’s face: does it say “eat my remains” or “stay away“?
Even though it’s made with real fruit, the rest of this design screams medical waste.

Are there ads that just seem wrong, or that need further comment?
Let me know on Twitter, or by email: strategy2.0<at>gmail.com.  I’m always glad to get ideas, guest posts, and encouragement for a brief respite from online marketing law.

As the case of the Pennsylvania school system that allegedly spied on their students gains broader attention, the Lazy Man and Money blog raises a provocative question…why sue a school?

Lawyers and lawsuits are controversial, especially as we debate health care and malpractice reform.  I’d like to hear what you think about this. The more views the better.  (Hat tip to James Gardner of Adverlicious for pointing this one out.)

“What if the school is found guilty of all these violations?” The damages could be millions and spread across numerous families. On the outset it would seem that justice would be served and everyone could just move on. However, the community would be left with a bankrupt school system. That typically means raised taxes. So others in the town would have to pick up the pieces. This leads me to think, the ones who “win” could be the lawyers. It might even be in the community’s best interest to root for the school as outlandish as it sounds.

First, let’s recognize that all the facts of the case are not yet clear.  Above the Law reports that the student, Blake Robbins, may have posted photos taken with the webcam of his school’s computer on Facebook, and he may have made some statements about personal drug use there too. We don’t know the facts, so let’s stipulate for our discussion they are just as claimed in his complaint.

What Good is Suing a School?

What good is a lawsuit?
Have you ever been frustrated by the bureaucracy, delay, and disregard of renewing a drivers license at the state DMV in person? Imagine if the business you came to that agency to transact was far more serious to you and your family. And imagine the agency was slow or reluctant to respond.

The civil courts are like an emergency break through which the people can directly access the courts, when local or distant law officials are slow to act. Some people may complain about lawsuits, but civil justice is an override that protects the people from an non-responsive state.

Law enforcement officials could have stepped forward based on potential violations of state or  federal law. In fact, because of the lawsuit, the FBI is now investigating to see if a federal crime was committed.

Is a lawsuit  the right route?
Now that the FBI is involved, perhaps the threat of the lawsuit has done all the good it can. Not necessarily. Criminal courts often have a higher standard for conviction than a civil ruling.

But more important, criminal courts are more likely to focus on individual actors unless there was a broad criminal conspiracy. In contrast, the civil suits are more likely to focus on Lower Merion School District, which perhaps should have better considered the privacy concerns of putting webcams in homes, or better supervised their staff.

Continued