Category: Advertising

Monsanto, Big Food Battle California GMO Disclosure Measure

Big food, candy and chemical companies are pouring tens of millions of dollars into fighting California’s Proposition 37,  which would require foods be labeled as to whether they contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Genetically-modified foods have their DNA artificially altered in a laboratory, for example Monsanto genetically engineered a type of sweet corn to make it also contain an insecticide. GMOs have been linked to allergies, organ toxicity and other ailments. The problem is, consumers are in the dark about whether the foods they buy contain GMOs because food producers have not been required to identify foods that contain them.  Monsanto has paid over $4.3 million to fight Proposition 37,  followed by DuPont, ($4 million), Pepsi ($2.1 million), Bayer ($2 million), Dow ($2 million), Coca Cola ($1.69 million), Nestle ($1.46 million) and ConAgra Foods ($1.1 million). Other companies working to defeat the disclosure law include familiar household companies that dominate the grocery stores, like Campbell’s Soup, General Mills, Bumble Bee (tuna), Hershey’s, Heinz, Kellogg, Kraft, Land O’Lakes (butter), McCormick (spices), Nestle (cocoa), Tree Top (apple juice), Smuckers (jam), and Welch’s (grape juice). The big food and chemical companies have hired former tobacco industry operatives to apply big Tobacco’s playbook to fight the initiative. Hiring out professional PR flacks to oppose the measure also distances the companies from the unpopular effort and helps shield their valuable brands from backlash. The “No” campaign is using the tobacco industry tactic of  hiding behind a front group made to appear as though it is made up of small businesses, family farmers and the like, to give the public the impression that the anti-37 effort is a “grassroots” campaign by real people. Far from it. The “Yes on 37” campaign points out that many of the wealthy companies secretly bankrolling the fight against Prop. 37 are the same ones that for years assured Americans that cigarettes were safe, and DDT and Agent Orange were harmless.

Romney Continues Attacking U.S. Automakers with Misleading Ads

Mitt Romney

General Motors publicly rebuked Mitt Romney over a misleading Ohio radio campaign ad that wrongly infers GM is planning to move U.S. auto manufacturing jobs to China. The ad’s narrator states, “Under President Obama, GM cut 15,000 American jobs, but they are planning to double the number of cars built in China, which means 15,000 more jobs for China. And now comes word that Chrysler plans to start making Jeeps in, you guessed it, China.” GM spokesman Greg Martin said “We’ve clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days. No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.” Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne, similarly tried to limit the damage Romney has done to his company’s reputation after Romney lied at a campaign event October 27 when he wrongly stated Jeep was moving all its manufacturing jobs to China. Marchionne sent an email out to employees reiterating that “Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China. The numbers tell the story…Those include more than $1.7 billion to produce the successor of the Jeep Liberty and hire about 1,100 workers on a second shift by 2013.” Earlier this month, the Salt Lake City Tribune, the leading newspaper in the most Republican state in the U.S. and in the heart of Mormon country, endorsed Barack Obama for president, calling Romney “shameless” and suggesting the GOP presidential nominee will say whatever he thinks he must to win votes.

Main Sources: Business Insider, October 30, 2012 and the Detroit Free Press, October 30, 2012

The Air Force Academy’s “Religious Respect” PR Stunt

Crystal Cathedral on the grounds of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs

The United States Air Force Academy (AFA) is fighting its reputation as an aggressive promoter of fundamentalist Christianity by holding a conference on religious respect this week, but organizers conspicuously excluded representatives of secular belief systems like atheists, agnostics and humanists.  Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), who is Jewish and a 1977 graduate of the academy, believes the  conference is a public relations stunt to try and improve the AFA’s image. An AFA press release promoting the Conference said “attendees will comprise a widely diverse mix of religious affiliations …” and “Attendees will review and discuss the new Religious Respect Training Program for cadets that includes training in both the Establishment and Free Exercise of Religions clauses of the First Amendment of the US Constitution.” But in an October 29, 2012 press release, Weinstein pointed out that “secularists are the most disrespected and proselytized-to group, yet they are not even represented at this so-called ‘Religious Respect’ conference.”  Weinstein says the AFA hosting a religious respect conference is “akin to the KKK hosting an ‘African American Appreciation Conference.'”

Romney Doubles Down on Lie Told to Ohioans

Romney speaks to crowd in Defiance, Ohio (from YouTube)

GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney openly lied — again — at a campaign event in Defiance, Ohio Thursday, October 25, when he told a crowd of about 12,000 that Jeep is considering shifting all of its North American production to China. “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China,” Romney said. The statement is verifiably false. Chrysler’s vice president of communications, Gualberto Ranieri, publicly corrected Romney in a blog post on the company’s website. “Let’s set the record straight,” Ranieri wrote, “Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China.” Representatives from Romney’s campaign said candidate had misread the first two paragraphs of a Bloomberg news report that discussed the manufacture of Jeeps for the Chinese market. The article started out by saying Fiat, the company that now owns Chrysler, “plans to return Jeep output to China and may eventually make all of its models in the country.” It said that Chrysler and Fiat are evaluating additional production sites in China, not that they are shifting their output from North America to China.  Despite being publicly called out on the purported error by Chrysler, neither Romney nor his campaign workers have corrected the erroneous statement.  Quite the contrary — the Romney campaign has built on it. Romney has created a new campaign ad around his misleading statement. The ad says, “Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.” The Salt Lake City (Utah) Tribune, a conservative newspaper in the home of Mormonism, endorsed President Obama in an October 19th editorial titled “Too Many Mitts”, that called Romney the Republican Party’s “shape-shifting nominee.”

Major League Baseball’s Psuedo Anti-Cancer Ads

Major League Baseball “Stand Up to Cancer” ad

The first game of Major League Baseball’s World Series was filled with ads promoting MLB’s  association with a group called Stand Up To Cancer. The ads told viewers how MLB for standing up to cancer, but curiously only mentioned research. The ads offered no information at all about cost-free prevention methods that we already know really do work to prevent cancer, like quitting smoking and chewing tobacco, limiting alcohol consumption, staying physically active, maintaining a healthy weight and avoiding environmental pollutants. None of these methods require any research, and all are  inexpensive and known to be effective. Instead, MLB’s ads drive viewers to Stand Up To Cancer’s website, which does mention quitting smoking, although that information is buried several screens deep. The ads put all the front-and-center emphasis on research and fighting cancer at the cell level, rather than at the policy level, which is an extraordinarily expensive and relatively unproductive focus. Stand Up to Cancer’s website makes no mention whatsoever about policy changes we now know really do prevent disease when it come to smoking, like smoke-free public places and workplaces, eliminating smoking in movies, etc.  All MLB’s ads really mean is that MLB purchased a deft ad campaign that was designed to paint MLB as fighting a dread disease. The ads are very slick and good; they evoke emotion by focusing on how a dread disease affects real people, and frame MLB as part of the solution — exactly the right PR prescription for generating goodwill but making no real changes in the status quo. MLB bought itself some goodwill credits, but the ad campaign is guaranteed to have little or no effect on cancer deaths, and does nothing to give people real information on cost-free actions that really can affect cancer rates.

Exposed: Sweet Lies from the Sugar Industry

Misleading May, 1971 ad in LIFE magazine ad encouraging sugar intake

The November/December issue of Mother Jones magazine has an explosive new analysis of more than 1,500 pages of internal documents from the archives of now-defunct sugar companies that reveals that for 40 years, the sugar industry engaged in a massive PR campaign to sow doubt about studies linking sugar consumption to disease.  After a growing body of independent research started implicating sugar as a significant cause of heart disease, tooth decay, diabetes and other diseases, the sugar industry responded by developing a PR scheme that included secretly funding scientists to perform studies exonerating sugar as a source of disease. The sugar industry also secretly created a front group, the Food and Nutrition Advisory Council, that they stocked with physicians and dentists who were willing to defend sugar’s purported place in a healthy diet.  Sugar companies also worked to shift the conversation about diabetes away from sugar and boost the notion that dietary fats, especially saturated fats, were a bigger culprit in causing heart disease than sugar. 

Texas Church Marquee Urges “Vote for the Mormon, Not the Muslim!”

Church sign in Leakey, Texas violates IRS rule by urging people to vote for Romney.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) has asked the Internal Revenue Service (pdf) to investigate a Texas church after the pastor posted a message on the church’s marquee urging people to “VOTE FOR THE MORMON, NOT THE MUSLIM!  The “Mormon” reference is to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church. ABC News reported that the sign is an obvious reference to President Barack Obama, whom many conservatives believe is a “secret Muslim” even though President Obama says he is a Christian and attends church with his family. According to ABC News, Ray Miller, the pastor of the Church of the Valley in Leakey, Texas, said he put the sign up because “he feels strongly about the election.” The church sign violates U.S. law, however, which prohibits tax-exempt organizations, including all churches, from endorsing political candidates.

Source: Americans United for Separation of Church and State press release, October 23, 2012

How Corporations Influence the Media

How do corporations influence entire media markets? A 1995 Philip Morris (PM) document shows one way in which corporations work to influence the larger media to manipulate larger public opinion. The previously-secret document shows that PM hired a Denver-based public relations agency to implement an ambitious and comprehensive plan aimed at influencing Colorado media outlets and thus shift public opinion more in the company’s favor.

The document, titled “PM Media Action Network – Media Plan for Colorado,” was written by public relations firm Russell, Karsch & Hagen, based in Denver. It states:

“[We] will begin to reshape public opinion through the media…” and “…[W]e are confident we can continue to shift the media’s view, and, ultimately the view of the general public…toward issues affecting the industry.”

In keeping with PM’s internal adversarial view of public health efforts to reduce smoking, Russel, Karsch planned to develop a “War Book” of “key issues and message points we believe will be effective in Colorado.”

Michigan Town Asked to Remove Christian Cross from Public Park

Frankenmuth, Michigan’s giant, 55-foot tall cross in “Cross Park”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) has formally asked (pdf) to the city of Frankenmuth, Michigan to remove a 55-foot tall Christian cross from a public park. The cross was erected in a 1976 ceremony attended by then-Mayor of Frankenmuth Elmer Simon, who, at the dedication ceremony, said that “The simple cross of Christ assures us that life does not end with death. From our local heritage, this Christian symbol suggests that we are also a community under Christ.” More recently, the City has referred to the cross as “a tribute to the religious commitment of the Frankenmuth community.” AU points out that the display of a Christian cross in a taxpayer-supported public park is an unlawful endorsement of Christianity. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits government from promoting one religion above all others, and from promoting religion over non-religion, the group says, citing legal precedent for the symbol’s removal. AU suggested the City remove the cross to private land, and wrote, “Failure to remove the cross will expose the City to a significant risk of litigation.” AU requested a response from the City within 30 days. Frankenmuth is a city of about 5,000 nicknamed “Little Bavaria” that trades on its Bavarian-themed, timber-framed architecture, shops, breweries and German culture.

Rush on the Ropes in Missoula

Rush Limbaugh

RushOutOfMissoula.com, the grassroots effort to push  Rush Limbaugh off the air in Missoula, Montana, reports making “fabulous headway” this week in their effort. Six more advertisers have opted to pull their advertising from Limbaugh’s show on KGVO radio in just the last week, bringing the total of businesses shunning his show in Missoula to 41.  “They made a good decision, but only because we made our voices heard,” said Dave Chrismon, who organized RushOutOfMissoula.com. Some of the remaining local advertisers include Adair Jewelers, Bagels on Broadway, The BBQ Pit and Big Sky Glass, Montana Republican Party/Denny Rehberg for Senate and Montana Pro Life Coalition. National advertisers include Allegiant Airlines, Blackjack Pizza, and MaxMuscle.

Limbaugh Show Has Lost 35 Advertisers in Missoula

Rush Limbaugh

RushOutOfMissoula.com, the grassroots effort to push Rush Limbaugh off KGVO Radio in Missoula, Montana, announced this week that three more advertisers have walked away from Limbaugh’s show in the last week, bringing the total to advertisers who have ended their sponsorship of Limbaugh’s show on KGVO to 35. Dave Chrismon, organizer of RushOutOfMissoula, thanked supporters for “helping draw attention to this bully and his track record of nasty, personal attacks.” When RushOutOfMissoula first debuted on April 13, 2012, the Limbaugh Show in Missoula aired four public service announcements. By June 29th that number had jumped to 13 as the radio station struggled to fill gaps left by advertisers fleeing the show. Ads for local businesses dropped from 26 in April to 17 on June 29th. KGVO is still filling the same number of ad slots but is repeating many of the same ads frequently and running many more PSAs in place of paid ads. Adair Jewelers, Sunshine Motors, Trader Brothers, and H & H Meats are some of the local advertisers whose ads have run more than once in the same program. Adair Jewelers, whose owner denounced the RushOutOfMissoula effort as “blackmail,” has had as many as eight ads run in the same program. Businesses and nonprofit groups who have removed their advertising from Limbaugh’s show report they have continued to receive harassing phone calls from Rush supporters. To stop this, RushOutOfMissoula stopped listing these businesses on the site’s “Rush’s Advertisers” page, and changed to an “opt-in” policy where businesses will appear if they request it.  The group will continue to keep records of advertisers who pull their ads as a result of efforts by RushOutOfMissoula.

Three More Businesses Drop Limbaugh Show in Missoula

Rush Limbaugh

Three more businesses have pulled their ads from Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in Missoula, Montana in response to a grassroots effort by Missoula citizens to let KGVO Radio, broadcaster of the show, know they have had enough of Limbaugh. The latest advertisers to drop their sponsorship brings the total number of advertisers who have dumped Limbaugh’s show in Missoula to 33. Supporters of the effort to push Limbaugh off the air in Missoula, have been called “radicals” for contacting businesses to let them know they disapprove of their sponsorship of Limbaugh’s show. “Fighting bullies and speaking our minds doesn’t make us radicals. It makes us good, patriotic Americans,” responds Dave Chrismon, organizer of RushOutOfMissoula.com. Chrismon has instructed people contacting businesses over their ads to be polite and respectful when they call. “Be an anti-bully,” he says, urging people to “Drive your point home by being respectful.” RushOutOfMissoula.com says it is the voice of the free market and of a “new, bully-free community standard.” KGVO Radio has not yet responded to the news about the most recent three businesses to pull their ads off the show. The station’s last web post about the fracas is dated May 1, 2012. It thanks Limbaugh supporters for their passionate defense of his show.

DumpsterCam PR Effort Boosts Respect for Garbage Workers

TrashCam photo credit: Roland Wilhelm/ Stadtreinigung Hamburg/ Scholz & Friends

Garbage workers around the world have a physically difficult, smelly job few people want, and typically don’t get much respect or recognition for their efforts, either. So the sanitation department in Hamburg, Germany decided to find a way to improve respect for their workers. With the help of a German advertising agency and a garbage worker who moonlights as an amateur photographer, they came up with a PR campaign that worked to turn Hamburg’s garbage collectors into celebrities. Sanitation workers converted a 290 gallon trash dumpster into a pinhole camera and hauled it around on their routes to places the workers had said they had always wanted to photograph. Dubbed the “TrashCam,” the container had a 0.3-inch pinhole in one side. The workers would open a flap over the pinhole and allow light to project onto a 39 inch by 31 inch piece of photographic paper inside the dumpster, creating a photo. Workers would expose the paper for anywhere from five to 70 minutes, and the photos were developed in a lab later that evening. The result was a series of striking black and white photos that won the sanitation workers a prestigious advertising industry award at the Cannes Lion advertising festival. The photos will be on exhibition starting June 23 at the Axel Springer Passage exhibition space in Hamburg. You can see the photo gallery here.

Source: Spiegel Online International, June 22, 2012

“Energy Times” and the Stealth Marketing of Dietary Supplements

“Napalm,” a dietary supplement found by FDA to contain a chemical called DMAA, which can lead to a heart attack.

Yesterday I stopped at a Natural Grocers market to pick up some ginger ale, and the store gave me a free copy of the June issue of a magazine called “Energy Times” with my purchase. As I glanced through it before throwing it out, I noticed it contained big ads for supplements that promised weight loss, “digestive perfection,” better blood circulation, additional energy and sexual enhancement. Page 12 had an article saying the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is “attacking health freedom.” Right next to the article was a prepaid, business-reply tear-out postcard with blazing red lettering screaming, “Don’t Let the FDA Take Your Vitamins Away! …Join the [National Health Alliance] and protect your health care rights.”

I follow much of what the FDA does, and I just didn’t buy the idea that the FDA was out to take away vitamins or infringe on my health care rights. But it got my curiosity up about how I ended up with this crazy magazine.

Marx MasterCards Prove Highly Popular in Germany

Karl Marx MasterCard

The Sparkasse Bank in Chemnitz, in eastern Germany, asked customers to vote on images they would most like to see on their MasterCards, and by far the winner was Karl Marx, the German philosopher who predicted the end of capitalism. More than one third of people voting selected Marx’s image. The bank reports that even people in western Germany were calling and asking to open bank accounts to get a MasterCard with Marx’s image on it. Reuters reports that a survey done in 2008 revealed that 52 percent of citizens living in eastern Germany thought the free market economy was “unsuitable” and 43 percent preferred to go back to a socialist system. NPR’s Planet Money, in a report on the Karl Marx MasterCard, asked people to suggest possible slogans to advertise the card. Some of the responses?  “Che Guevara t-shirt: $15. Annotated copy of the Communist Manifesto: $10. Being able to demonstrate your ideological confusion every time you make a purchase: Priceless.,” “I don’t always seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie, but when I do, I prefer the Marx MasterCard,” “A Mastercard for the master race,” and my personal favorite: “Use it when you’re in the red.”

Main sources: National Public Radio, June 15, 2012 and Reuters, June 15, 2012

ALEC Meets its Match in Fake ALEC PR Website

Sample graphic from IStandWithAlec.org

As corporations continue to flee the embattled American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC is struggling to stop the bleeding with a new a damage-control website called “IStandWithALEC.com,” that blames former Obama administrator Van Jones, George Soros and “Big Labor” for recent woes that have put the group on the hot seat.  But as soon as ALEC put up its new site, the controversial group was met with yet another activist challenge: a hilarious, new competing one-page website with the very similar domain name, “IStandWithALEC.org,” that features pictures of Alec Baldwin and says, “I stand with Alec, not ALEC.” The site is filled with funny pictures of Alac Baldwin and statements contrasting how nice Alec Baldwin is and how mean ALEC is, like “Alec Baldwin created a scholarship for low income drama students…ALEC creates scholarships for corporations to funnel money to legislators,” and “Alec likes surfing the web naked,” but “ALEC wants you to pay 750% more for high-speed Internet.” The site asks visitors to “Join our efforts to stand up to front groups like ALEC!” The dueling websites make it clear that anti-ALEC activists aren’t cutting ALEC much slack these days, no matter what corporate PR strategy it tries to try and escape from its death spiral.

RJR’s “Project SCUM” Targeted Gays, the Homeless, Immigrants and Youth

 

Front page of RJR’s “Project Scum” document

This post is part of our ongoing series exploring the millions of previously-secret tobacco industry documents now available on the Internet. – Ed.

“Project SCUM” was R.J. Reynolds’ plan to increase sales of Camel cigarettes in the San Francisco area by marketing them to gay people in the Castro district, “rebellious, Generation X” -ers, people of “international influence” and “street people,” by introducing Camel cigarettes into less-traditional retail outlets like “head shops.” SCUM was an acronym that stood for “Sub-Culture Urban Marketing.” RJR’s rationale for the project was a higher incidence of smoking and drug use in these subcultures.  There are several versions of the “Project SCUM” document, ranging in dates from 1995-97.  Each offers revealing marginalia (handwritten markings on the page). For example, in one document, handwritten in next to a bulleted list of consumer subcultures are the words “Gay/Castro” and “Tenderloin,” referring to gay areas of San Francisco.  Next to a list that discusses the rationale for the program, a line says “higher incidents of smoking in subcultures” and has the phrase “and drugs” handwritten in.  On yet another copy, the phrase “and drugs” is crossed out, revealing RJR’s  ambivalence about their exploitation of the drug culture.  A later copy of the document’s title page has the word “SCUM” crossed out and the word “Sourdough” handwritten in, as though RJR  realized too late the derogatory name they had slapped on their customers. See a copy of RJR’s Project Scum document here.

 

More Advertisers Yank Ads from Limbaugh Show on KGVO in Missoula

Supporters of the effort to get Rush Limbaugh off the airwaves in Missoula, Montana are celebrating another milestone this week: They’ve gotten fully thirty advertisers to pull their ads off Limbaugh’s show on KGVO radio in Missoula. To emphasize that Rush Limbaugh is a bully who is offensive to their community, RushOutOfMissoula.com this week features video of a March, 2012 interview with Michael J. Fox on CNN’s Piers Morgan Show that revisits Limbaugh’s 2006 attack on Fox after Fox made a political ad supporting Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill because of her stand supporting stem cell research. In the ad, Fox displays obvious symptoms of Parkinson’s disease as he twitches and moves awkwardly during the ad. Limbaugh characterized the ad as “shameless,” saying it was “purely an act.” He speculated that Fox was either acting or that he intentionally stopped taking his anti-Parkinson’s medicine prior to making the ad to emphasize the severity of his symptoms and elicit sympathy. The backlash against Limbaugh’s cruel and inappropriate statements about Fox eventually prompted Limbaugh to say he would “apologize to Michael J. Fox, if I am wrong in his characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act, since people are telling me they have seen him this way on other interviews and in other television appearances.” RushOutOfMissoula.com supporters are moving forward in their efforts to pressure advertisers to leave the show, saying Limbaugh is a bully who exceeds the limits of community norms by vulgarly denigrating others for their political views.