Wal-Mart Whoopsie
See Wal-Mart. See Wal-Mart come under fire for keeping downward pressure on employee wages… and health care… and paid leave… and even lunch breaks.
See Wal-Mart hire mega-P.R. firm Edelman to handle the problem.
See Edelman create “Jim & Laura,” two bloggers who were supposedly traveling across the country and parking their R.V. in Wal-Mart parking lots.
See Edelman being outed as having created, almost whole-cloth, “Jim & Laura” as part of Wal-Mart’s P.R. effort, under the guise of “Working Families for Wal-Mart“– a breach of WOMMA ethics.
See Edelman not register the “Working Families for Wal-Mart” domain name.
Email Article Saturday, November 18th, 2006 at 04:41pm Mack Simpson
Filed under: Ad Jungle, Ad Nauseam | add this post to del.icio.us
Technorati Tags: Wal-Mart, Edelman, Public Relations, Marketing, Jim and Laura, Working Families for Wal-Mart
3 Comments Add your own
1. makethelogobigger | November 18th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
Oops.
;-p
They still coulda saved the idea.
First, be up-front that they’re using reporters. But instead of families, make it about employees. Travel around, get various stories from the day/night shifts around the country and all the unusual/unique characters and make a series of profiles about them.
Cutting-edge and funky? Nope. In this case, didn’t need to be. Considering the Wal-Mart demo, it’s right up their alley.
That way, nobody cares who’s driving around, since it’s no longer about them, but the stories. The project was doomed the second they faked the blogger’s identities. The blogosphere is full of people with too much time on their hand trying to uncover stuff like this.
I don’t have any inside knowledge of what went down, but it’s surprising to think Edelman didn’t have anyone there like a creative director to say, hey, trust me, don’t do this.
Which means for such a supposed industry-leading firm, they come off as either less than knowledgable on what current trends are, or,
…they did know and said screw it, let’s try and get one by. Which makes them look duplicitous.
If I’m a prospective client, neither choice looks good.
2. Magno | November 28th, 2006 at 9:10 pm
Mack:
My IT department is ripshit that I spit my tea all over my monitor and keyboard I was laughing so hard. See Edelman say “Oh Crap” indeed!
I’ve linked to you at the Digital Hive blog (http://digitalhive.blogs.com/digiblog/). Thanks for the best laugh of the week!
3. Mack Simpson | November 28th, 2006 at 9:32 pm
You’re my favorite Boston Baked Bean.
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