The Parliamentary standards watchdog has criticised Channel 4 and The Daily Telegraph for unfairly tarnishing the reputations of Malcolm Rifkind (Conservative) and Jack Straw (Labour). Both politicians were caught in a sting earlier this year in which they thought they were going to make a lot of money by selling their knowledge of governments, and their ability to influence them, to Chinese business interests. (See Marketing Matters, Issue 43, March/April 2015, JACK GOES UNDER THE RADAR) Continue reading →

Amazon are taking 1,114 people to court who they say have been paid to write fake reviews to boost customer confidence in products and services, aspects that Amazon says tarnishes their image.

The action, launched in Seattle USA, follows Amazon’s successful legal actions in April against four websites offering positive reviews for sale.

Another online scam going around, and hacking into people’s email accounts to do it, is designed to encourage those who would like to make around £100,000 a year from easy share-dealing from home to sign up for a £200 scheme that uses, they say “a patented mathematical algorithm that was developed especially for binary options trading” to accurately predict shares likely to make a profit for those buying them. Continue reading →

An Ofcom investigation into “documentaries” broadcast by the BBC has found that nearly 200 of them were supplied at no cost, with many secretly funded by special interests and with no sponsorship credits to let viewers know of the possibly biased content. (Press Gazette)

In one example the Independent newspaper reported in 2011 that the Malaysian government had paid ironically-named PR company FactBased Communications (FBC) nearly £12 million over two years to make and place content promoting Malaya positively in “factual” and current affairs programmes. BBC World News, that screened eight half-hour programmes supplied by FBC claimed that they had no idea that they were broadcasting paid-for PR, even though it was given to them free. The poor deluded BBC now accepts that FBC was “not an appropriate producer” for BBC World News. Continue reading →

Some marketeers are finding out the hard way the difference between a carbon copy (cc) and a blind carbon copy (bcc) when bulk emailing, and it’s a common but potentially dangerous error for those who accidentally get it wrong.

As an HIV clinic in London very recently found out when they sent out their newsletter using the cc rather than the bcc option on their email system. Pasting email addresses into the bcc field usually prevents individual recipients from knowing who else has received the email, so the clinic sent every recipient the email addresses of every other recipient, that is more than 780 patients of the HIV facility. This was a serious error with likely repercussions as sensitive medical information of this kind is sought after by cyber criminals bent on using it for identity theft, or even blackmail. And insurers are increasingly likely to dispute claims arising from the failure of an organisation to protect sensitive patient data. Continue reading →

The old adage that “sex sells” has been questioned after a study at Ohio State University has shown that graphic sexual images can actually distract potential customers and make them forget about buying the product, with the same claim levelled against images of violence.

Accordingly, say the US researchers, advertisers need to carefully consider their approach, in terms of the use of these images, and also the sex and violence content of TV programmes and films they sponsor, or show their ads during.

A misleading leaflet published by Iain Duncan Smith’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) used fake stories of benefit claimants to sell the DWP’s benefit sanctions regime, without making it clear that the stories were fiction. The leaflet has now been withdrawn.

The dishonesty of DWP marketeers came to light after a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from Welfare Weekly magazine. This asked the DWP to prove that “Zac’s story” and “Sarah’s story”, two statements with photographs from two people who claimed to have treated very fairly by Duncan Smith’s department over benefit sanctions, were in fact true stories of real people. The DWP was unable to do so and admitted that they’d used stock photographs and made the stories up to suit their promotional message.

After the FOI request the leaflet was quickly wiped off the DWP website, but not before Welfare Weekly had put it up as a pdf on theirs.

The payment of the national living wage of £7.20 an hour to all staff over 25 years old at the Whitbread-owned Costa coffee shops will mean price rises for customers when it kicks in next April.

This is the warning from the £4.6 million a year (£383 an hour) Whitbread chief executive Andy Harrison who is paid more than 50 times the living wage out of the huge profits to be made from selling a £2 plus product with a 10 pence ingredient cost. Continue reading →

The organising committee of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics have withdrawn their recently-designed logos, with considerable loss and embarrassment, after Belgian designer Olivier Debie claimed they were close copies of a logo he had designed for a Belgian theatre, and threatened legal action for plagiarism.

The committee originally contested the allegation, noting that the theatre logo was not trademarked and in any case stating their conviction that their version was an original design. Their designer, Kanjiro Sano also denied plagiarism. Continue reading →