A campaign by Yellow Pages to create social media hype with the promise of free pizza has backfired spectacularly, proving just how irrelevant the clunky old book — and its online arm — is in the age of Google, Twitter and Foursquare, explains Lachy Warton.
FAIL
Nestle’s Facebook FAIL
Food empire Nestle showed how not to do social marketing recently, pissing off fans by deleting comments and engaging in childish flame-wars with critics, before finally having to apologise: “I have stopped being rude.”
Happy International Women’s Day from Freedom Furniture
What better way to celebrate the emancipation of women than with this timely ad from Freedom Furniture, declaring: “Every woman’s dream: Being rewarded to go shopping”.
Bad fashion shoot concepts #253: The Holocaust
The publisher of airline EasyJet’s inflight magazine has been forced to apologise after the mag staged a fashion photoshoot at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial. Maybe red flags aren’t “in” this season…
Local newsreaders attempt to explain “emo”. Fail.
When news programs attempt to keep up with “da yoof”, hilarity often ensues. Case in point, this round-up of local US news programs warning on the dangers of teen “emo” culture: “the more depressed you look, the more points you earn.”
Kraft caves, will create Vegemite 2.0.1
Only four days after it announced the name of its new Vegemite product, the widely-mocked “iSnack 2.0”, Kraft has admitted the moniker was a flop and will now give it another name. Can Crikey take some credit for its downfall? Probably not. Will we? Yes.
Vegemite’s new name unites the internet in contempt
Kraft has finally found a name for its “new” Vegemite — and it’s so horrible, the entire internet has gone into snark meltdown.
MTV recruits Twitter correspondent
Remember when MTV was counter-culture? Ah well, this is a post-Newlyweds world, and the music channel is desperately chasing the zeitgeist by adding blogger iJustine as a “Twitter correspondent” for this year’s Video Music Awards. “OMGZ!! WATCH ME ON THE 2009 VMAs!!!!” she vlogs.
FAIL: how one word went from verb to interjection… to viral
How did the word ‘fail’ go from humble verb to an epically popular interjection and internet phenomenon? A tale of syntax and social media.
O’Reilly’s muddled maths
Why does America have lower life expectancy than Canada? Why, because they have more people and thus more accidents, says Bill O’Reilly.
Daily Tele serves up a big plate of fail
Keen to scoop all the other news outlets with the story of who won last night’s MasterChef finale, the Daily Telegraph filed their story on it half an hour before the fact — and with the wrong winner.
Starbucks’ new marketing strategy: pretending not to be Starbucks
Starbucks are renaming and redesigning some of their stores to look like local, independent coffee stores. Meanwhile, they’ve pissed off real local, independent coffee stores by sending in scouts to snoop around and “research” how they work.
In Soviet News Corp, typo edits you
The pot looked rather black after “a doozy of a typo” appeared in the Oz opinion page headline yesterday over the extract of John Hartigan’s speech.
The Hun‘s multimedia fail
The Herald Sun beef out a story with some clips nicked from YouTube… they probably should have actually watched them first.
It’s 2007 all over again at Adelaide Now
Adelaide Now has all the latest news from, err, Peter Costello’s budget…
Foster’s intranet goes public — here are the highlights
Foster’s Group’s IT management seems to have lost the plot, with the company accidently opening up their intranet to the web.
#amazonfail: the book giant begins to rebuild its image
Amazon have labelled their cataloguing cock-up on the weekend as “embarrassing and ham-fisted”. We look at what the pundits are saying. Crikey intern Eloise Keating writes.
