It has already presided over one of the biggest PR disasters of the year and now Vodafone faces being sued by potentially thousands of its customers over poor network performance.
Sydney law firm PiperAlderman is seeking out disgruntled Vodafone customers to form a class action lawsuit over dropped calls, reception issues and poor data performance that have left customers fuming.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has already said it is investigating the matter.
Vodafone initially blamed software bugs and argued that there were no serious problems with its network. Continue Reading
Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld complaints about an ice-cream company’s magazine ad featuring a pregnant nun, ordering that it not be published again.
The print advertisement by Antonio Federici, published in The Lady and Grazia in June, featured a heavily pregnant nun eating from a tub of ice-cream, accompanied by the slogan “immaculately conceived”.
The ad was part of its “ice-cream is our religion” campaign.
Some Catholics are said to have found it offensive, the UK advertising standards board agreed and banned it.
Quite right, too.
That should please the Catholics.
You’d think the UK Ad Standards Board would feel satisfied at a job well done.
And the company, the recipient of all this free global publicity, should be happiest of all.
All this attention, that hasn’t cost a cent, has saved them a fortune in future advertising fees.
That’s a tough lesson for brand Tiger Woods, rename Cheetah Woods, to learn the hard way.
Hot on the heels of Accenture, Gillette and others, AT&T has joined the crowd, severing its ties with the golfing pro, joining a growing list of marketers distancing themselves from the golfer amid the public furor surrounding allegations of his infidelities.
“We are ending our sponsorship agreement with Tiger Woods and wish him well in the future,” said a spokesman for AT&T on Thursday.
AT&T’s relationship with Mr. Woods began more than five years ago when the telecommunications company started sponsoring Tiger Jam, an annual star-studded concert that is the biggest fund-raiser for the Tiger Woods Foundation.
That contract gave AT&T the right to have Mr. Woods conduct golf clinics for its customers, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The phone giant further expanded its relationship with the golfer in February to include having its corporate logo—a blue and white sphere—appear on Mr. Woods’s golf bag. Continue Reading
In the courts of Public Opinion, it appears some people think that the means justifies the end.
Depending on what you believe, you’ll think that man-made climate change is either “the greatest moral challenge of our time” (aka, Kevin Rudd) or the biggest con of our time, just follow the money trail, it leads straight to Al Gore and those scientists on the receiving end of multi-million dollar grants.
Thankfully, some blokes at Futerra were up to the challenge to develop its Rules of The Game blueprint which outlines the communication strategy for the scare-the-bejeezus-out-of-you man-made climate change movement.
It begins by “blowing away some myths” such as the ones it identified below.
If you want to know how the doomsdayers convince YOU that the planet is about to end, polar bears are becoming extinct and all seaside homes will be under water in the next few years, read on.
Read on and be really, really offended that they insult your intelligence this way. Continue Reading
From authenticity through to larrikin, it seems our branding experts have a range of branding options that might enable one of Australia’s most colourful characters in politics to ascend to the holy throne of Australian Prime Ministership.
“What he stands for is a kind of authenticity. There is so much spin and weasel words in politics, but he comes across as the guy who is prepared to run things up the flagpole,” says one.
“Abbott’s often criticised ability to speak his mind regardless of the consequences might prove to be the element that sets him apart,” says another.
In actual fact, Tony Abbott is a marketers dream.
But to get to that conclusion, we need to first revisit some basics in marketing strategy.
Let’s first be clear about challenger brands and what a challenger brand strategy is. Challenger brands attack. They do not defend.
Defense is the job of the market leader and in the case of the political arena, the market leader is the elected Government of the day. Continue Reading
So there’s this story inThe Australian about a fake memo that has been doing the rounds of the Internet claiming McDonald’s stores deliberately rip off customers.
The Australian says that it has been revealed to be the work of the same prankster behind an infamous email about a seven-legged spider (which is very funny if you haven’t seen it.)
The document, mocked-up with an official McDonald’s Australia letterhead and signed by fictitious managing director “Robert Trugabe”, outlines a secret plan to save money by leaving items out of drive-through orders.
“If the girls leave one item out of every second or third order, this adds up to several thousand dollars per week revenue,” it says.
“We need to work out if there is a way of making this a procedure without making it documented.”
This is a story that has made front page news for Australia’s biggest selling newspaper.
(Must be a slow news day.)
HUNDREDS of Melbourne’s most tech-obsessed geeks plan to smash the world record for robot dancing next week.
Robot lovers are already practising their moon walks and ‘pops’ for the official Guinness World record attempt at Melbourne University, but organizer Marita Cheng denies the effort smacks of being a nerd.
“Actually, I’m more of a geek.”
The third-year Carlton mechatronics engineering student has already locked in 400 robot dancers, but wants to hit 1000 to make sure the quirky world mark stays here.
The current world record is held by the University of Kent in the UK, which convinced 276 dancers to perform a robotic “Macarena” but Ms Cheng promises Melbourne’s effort will be a lot funkier.
Ms Cheng and her cohorts are part of Robogals, a non-profit group of young engineering undergraduates teaching robotics to schoolgirls to lift the profile of science in schools.
And if you’re interested in how robots are going to dance their way into the record books, you can buy the largest selling newspaper in Australia or view the rest of this story online.
