It's been Burger King's Modus operandi the past five years to make commercials that are -- for lack of a better term -- weird. While this plan started off with a bang and one of the first viral videos of the Web, lately it's been leading to more and more forgettable commercials (and even a video game) featuring The King.Now, though, Burger King may have veered from the weird into the just-plain-wrong with Whopper Virgins.
I'm no marketing expert, so when I read that our highly regarded sports architecture firm, HOK Sport Venue Event, changed its name to Populous, I was confused. Why ditch a well-known name for one that sounds like a pharmaceutical-grade acne medication?The name change was necessary after the local firm's management bought itself out from under St. Louis-based HOK Group at the end of 2008. A source at HOK Sport told me yesterday that the split happened because the KC office, with its focus on s
After enduring a spate of bad publicity from feuding in court, Coca-Cola and Pepsi have decided to make up. On Twitter.The idea was proposed by advertising agency Razorfish, whose co-founder Iain McDonald (the @eunmac in the tweets) suggested that it would be like "a public hug" for the two to follow each other. Coke took the initiative and 18 hours later, Pepsi followed.Razorfish called it "a historic moment in branding." Actually, it was more like a nice gesture, if totally meaningless. Follow
Second-quarter reports came in earlier this week, bringing heartening word that earnings for the Kansas City Star-owning McClatchy Co. were way up.According to the trade magazine Editor & Publisher:
McClatchy posted earnings of $42.2 million, or 50 cents per share, more than double its year-ago earnings and its first-quarter 2009 results.While advertising revenue slid 30 percent, McClatchy Chairman and CEO Gary Pruitt told analysts that the rate of decline in ad revenue slowed with every mon
