Could the current trend of companies begging for positive reviews on social media, and offering financial inducements for them be the (welcome?) death of it all any time soon?

After all anyone with more than one brain cell must realise that such bought recommendations are really not worth spit, like all those pathetic celebrity endorsements.

Or is there a huge and lucrative market of otherwise savvy followers out there that we don’t know about, who really believe stuff on social media, as well as in Santa Claus? Do tell.

Let’s hope that some of the extra staff that German discounter Lidl say they will be taking on as part of their expansion plans will be charged with making sure that offers made to attract customers to the store are actually honoured when the customers turn up.

At our local Bedford Lidl a recent offer of their award-winning Italian Parmagiano Reggiano DOP cheese for £7.45 a kilo was made as part of their popular Half Price Weekend promotion. However customers arriving on the Saturday morning and unable to find it on the shelves were told by staff that “it hasn’t been delivered” and “Sorry, it must have been dropped off somewhere else”.

Wonder if this is managerial incompetence, or if it’s a deliberate con……….?

Practitioners of public relations (PR) can’t be pleased to read about the imprisonment of one of their number, that nice Max Clifford, any more than they, and David Cameron, are about the activities of one A. Coulson, just given 18 months for conspiracy to hack phones, something he says his talented News of the World legal team never told him was illegal.

Let’s hope Max and Andy get a chance to meet up in jail and have some constructive conversations about how to prevent PR people from getting such a Bad Press, and being trusted less than politicians. Perhaps that nice and innocent Rebeckah Brooks and her blameless pal Rupert will visit the two and float some ideas……….?

Interesting that convicted sex attacker and the public face of PR, Max Clifford should claim that women who gave evidence against him before he was jailed for eight years were “in it for the money”.

Readers will recall that paedophile Paul Gadd, aka glam rocker Gary Glitter, was also up in court for sex attacks on a young woman in November 1999. At that time one of grubby Clifford’s grubby clients was Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and under a deal brokered by Clifford, who clearly cares deeply about vulnerable young women being groped by dirty old men like Gadd using their celebrity status to force sexual favours, the newspaper agreed to pay the victim of Gadd’s alleged attack £10,000 for her story, and another £25,000 if Gadd was convicted of the alleged offence. Continue reading →

The Go Compare ad featuring the opera singer generated the most complaints – 1008 – about advertising in 2012. This however was easily topped by the 2,200 complaints make to the BBC last week, about the mumbled dialogue in their costume drama Jamaica Inn (Tip: if you record it you can keep playing it back till you can make out what is said, ditto for sub-titles that flash off before you can read them. And recording means you can fast forward through all the ads, including Go Compare)

According to a report in Metro us Brits are the Europe’s biggest complainers about advertising, with more than 31,000 complaints being made in 2012 about 19,000 ads, according to the Advertising Standards Authority. And it’s not just ads that generate the gripes. Bankers Barclays received 309,000 complaints in the second half of 2013, with Lloyds getting 256,000. Complaints about energy companies rocketed so far this year by 224%, with 3,277 in the first three months of 2013 (17,960 in the year) and 10,600 in the first three months of 2014. Continue reading →

An ad by Dutch holiday park operatives Center Parcs has been deemed irresponsible by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) who say it would encourage parents to take their children out of school during term-time and risk a fine.

The TV ad showed parents enjoying themselves with their school-age children in some of the group’s five UK forest locations, but made it clear that the offer made to them was not available during school holidays or weekends, when Center Parcs prices rise steeply.

The ASA has forbidden Center Parcs to run the ad again.

An Ealing hairdresser who used a picture of popular and dapper North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with the caption “BAD HAIR DAY?” to promote a discount offer has complained to the police that he was visited by “threatening” officials from the North Korean embassy.

The officials reportedly ordered Mo Nabbach to take the poster, which showed Kim’s modern and stylish short back and sides, down because it was “disrespectful” to their leader. Nabbach says he politely advised them they were in England rather than North Korea and to call their lawyers. However he did remove it for a while, and then put it back up again when customers told him to, on the basis that England was a democracy.

The police, who also received complaints from the Kim heavies who visited, have said that no offence had been committed.

Nigel Farage of Ukip is doing his bit, we note, to persuade us all not to trust politicians, with his manifesto featuring a pic of an attractive and sincere-looking young lady who the caption describes as “Ukip voter, Devon”.

The copy has her saying “I’ll be voting Ukip because they’re the only party listening to what people want.” But a more honest quote might be “I’ll be voting Ukip because they’re the only party paying me to say this,” since it emerged that the young lady is Ukip’s event organiser and paid employee of Farage, Lizzie Vaid.

One for the ASA to look at?

An April Fool stunt by marketing mag The Drum has been variously branded “genius” and “puerile”.

The stunt involved daubing a battered taxi with mis-spellings of their competitor’s mags, that is “Marketing Weak” and “Campain” and towing it around London, following up with a “sincere” apology on the net.

The appropriate response of publishers Haymarket and Centaur next April are eagerly awaited……….