This year, Euronews has listed a dozen more examples in Marketing and the exploitation of 9/11 that are every bit as disturbing.  Here are the images:

The exploitation of 9/11 by marketers is disrespectful, irresponsible on every level. So, how do these images make you feel about the advertisers?

Are you a spammer? I don’t care what the technical definition is – if you make it hard for people to unsubscribe from your mailings, you might be viewed as one.

Don’t require multiple clicks to unsubscribe. Don’t force someone to enter their email address into your system to unsubscribe. Be responsible and use an email tool that allows people to unsubscribe with one click at the bottom of every email.

It’s not hard to fix: every major email marketing program with a reasonable reputation handles unsubscriptions this way.

Osama Bin Laden was a bad man and the world’s a better place without him. And I’m just as patriotic as the next guy.  But mark my words, soon you’ll see ads with American eagles and the American flag popping up, just like after 9/11 as advertisers aimed to capitalize on American emotions.

With thousands of lives lost and billions of dollars invested, using this tact is lazy, tacky and patently offensive.  If your company really cares, don’t commercialize–donate a portion from each sale to a veteran’s organization or one of the many groups that have been impacted by terrorists here and abroad.

But we simply couldn’t let this pass without saying something.

French newspaper Courrier International‘s tagline is “learn to anticipate.” Really, this is a decent tagline that has so many creative possibilities.

Then why exploit 9/11 and with such a lightweight and insensitive idea that if only the World Trade Center Towers were just a little shorter, things would have been a lot better?

This is socially irresponsible, ethically wrong and disrespectful in so many ways–especially as we approach the 9th anniversary of the attacks.

Courrier International, you should be ashamed of yourselves. You’ve made light of the loss of thousands of innocent lives in your half-assed attempt to be creative or edgy.

Welcome to the Responsible Marketing Hall of Shame.

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From the The Wall Street Journal:

The White House is calling on food makers to curb marketing of unhealthy foods to children, part of a broad assault against childhood obesity.

The recommendation is part of a 120-page report released Tuesday that outlines steps to fight the national epidemic. One in every three children ages 2-19 is overweight or obese, the report says. First Lady Michelle Obama has taken up childhood obesity as her signature cause.

The recommendations are for the food and beverage industry, media and entertainment companies and food retailers. Recommendations from the report urge these parties to:

• Extend their self-regulatory program to cover all forms of marketing to children
• Avoid in-store marketing that promotes unhealthy products to children
• Limit the licensing of popular characters to food and beverage products that are healthy and consistent with science-based nutrition standards
• Adopt meaningful, uniform nutrition standards for marketing food and beverages to children
• Develop a uniform standard for what constitutes marketing to children
• Set uniform guidelines to ensure that a higher proportion of advertisements shown on their networks and platforms are for healthy foods and beverages
• Introduce an on-air labeling system that helps consumers easily distinguish between advertising for healthy and unhealthy foods
• Develop and deploy technology to block unhealthy food and beverage advertising

And if the above doesn’t work, the FCC will be called in to revisit and modernize children’s programming rules.

Click here to download the 120-page report[3.3 MB].

This is a step in the right direction, but is it enough? Self-regulation hasn’t worked well on Wall Street. Will this be enough to rein-in Madison Avenue?

I doubt it, but what do you think?

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. . .

Inspired by this tweet by Hank Wasiak.

Here’s what Earl is saying:

Tiger, I am more prone to be inquisitive, to promote discussion. I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are. And did you learn anything?

On the surface it may seem like a bit of a head-scratcher for Nike: Woods’ father wasn’t faithful, either.

But consider this: Most of Tiger’s sponsors have bailed except Nike and it’s in their best interest to see him restored. This video shows a remorseful Woods looking his fans straight in the eye. By approving and participating in this ad, he’s showing he hasn’t forgotten his roots. That he knows his father wouldn’t approve. And that he’s learned something.

Opinions are polarized from the general public. Here are two from YouTube:

This is brilliant, Nike’s invested too much time and money into Tiger Woods to not do something like this. I give this a thumbs up with the reasoning that it isn’t often a sponsor will put money into saving a sports figure. And I think Tiger approving of it means he’s really showing the amount of change he’s willing to make to appear as an honourable sports figure again. I LIKE THIS. ~nboysis

Corporate damage control and a well-orchestrated PR campaign. And who really knows what Earl would say? He’s DEAD. Now? Tiger and Nike are bringing him back from the dead to pimp him out for greed. Poor taste Tiger….you would come across better by keeping a low profile in my opinion and working on your marriage to save your image, not your corporate whores. ~zenstate

So, is Nike’s new Tiger ad responsible or not? What say you?

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But your positioning has to be more than simply unique and matter to your prospects. It has to be true, too.

With that in mind, watch this:

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If you are selling “the world’s toughest phone” that’s “virtually unbreakable,” perhaps it should be.

While Sonim XP1 CEO Bob Plaschke handled this with an amazing amount of grace, the fact is it would appear to some that this is nothing more than another hollow marketing claim.

Persuasion, good.
Puffery, bad.

Not just because you might get caught. It’s because it doesn’t respect the people that ultimately pay the bills—your customers.

Is Sonim guilty of the age-old marketer’s practice of marketing puffery? Considering their “unbreakable” phone broke, does it really matter?

What do you think?

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Imagine it: The greatest Olympian of all time (at least by medal count), the best basketball and baseball player today, and the person that has almost single-handedly popularized skateboarding and extreme sports—all in the same ad.

Wow.

Here’s Activision’s Guitar Hero ad featuring Kobe Bryant, Alex Rodriguez, Michael Phelps and Tony Hawk:

Of course, now the ad features a basketball player accused of rape, an Olympian caught smoking dope and a baseball player that has admitted to using steroids.

For most products, this ad would be pulled immediately. Not so with Activision.

In an interview in the New York Daily News, sports business consultant Marc Ganis said these controversies won’t necessarily hurt sales, stating that “the target market for Guitar Hero is younger counterculture youth for whom this kind of behavior is not considered very negative.”

That raises so many questions, doesn’t it?

Considering the Guitar Hero target, have the A-Rod and Phelps revelations actually helped Activision?

Comment below to weigh in.

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Few professional athletes have ever been bigger than George Herman “Babe” Ruth.

His achievements on the baseball field were epic, garnering him the nicknames “The Sultan of Swat,” “The Colossus of Clout,” “The Titan of Terror,” “The King of Crash,” and of course, “The Great Bambino.”

Arguably, the greatest player in the game today is Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod has a few nicknames, too:

• After leaving Seattle for a “contender,” he signed the largest contract in baseball history to play with the Texas Rangers—a team that has never contended—he became “Pay-Rod”
• He’s known as the “The Cooler,” since teams go cold when he joins them and hot when he leaves
• Several nicknames I won’t repeat due to his philandering, most notably with Madonna
• In light of the recent steroid revelations, he’ll forever be known as “A-Roid,” “A-Fraud” and “Alex Roidriguez”

Still, prior to the steroids news, baseball fans held out Rodriguez as the one person that might be able to remove the asterisk from Barry Bond’s home run record.

What does all this have to do with Responsible Marketing?

Baseball has a trust problem, and last April I asked the question, Can Responsible Marketing save baseball?

In it, I was hopeful that some of the things the MLB was doing might be able to help baseball regain its footing.

But as the highest paid player in the game, A-Rod’s irresponsible and fraudulent actions have a reverse halo effect (also known as the ‘devil effect’) on the MLB brand.

So, now I’m left asking the question again, do you believe Responsible Marketing can save baseball?

What’s your take?

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The Coca-Cola Company is being sued by the Center for Science in the Public Interest for deceptive claims regarding it’s VitaminWater product line.

Coke markets VitaminWater as a “healthful alternative to soda by labeling its several flavors with such health buzz words,” and claims they “variously reduce the risk of chronic disease, reduce the risk of eye disease, promote healthy joints, and support optimal immune function.”

The CSPI news release further asserts, “VitaminWater contains between zero and one percent juice, despite the full names of the drinks, which include “endurance peach mango” and “focus kiwi strawberry,” and “xxx blueberry pomegranate acai,” among others. A press release for the “xxx” drink claims its antioxidants makes the drinker “last longer” in some unspecified way; in any event, it has no blueberry, pomegranate, or acai juice, nor do the others have any cranberry, grapefruit, dragon fruit, peach, mango, kiwi, or strawberry juice.”

Here’s Coke’s response to the CSPI lawsuit:

This is a ridiculous and ludicrous lawsuit. glacéau vitaminwater is a great tasting, hydrating beverage with essential vitamins and water, with labels showing calorie content.

Filing a lawsuit is an opportunistic PR stunt. This is not about protecting the public interest. This is about grandstanding at a time when CSPI is receiving very little attention. There is no surprise that one week before the inauguration of the U.S. President, with the flurry of activity in Washington, D.C., that CSPI has chosen today to try to bring attention to themselves.

We don’t need a “healthful” alternative to sodas. All our beverages, including sparkling and diets, can be part of healthful diet. Furthermore, consumers today are aware and are looking for more from their beverages than just hydration. Products like glacéau vitaminwater provide a great tasting choice for hydration that also helps contribute to daily needs for some essential nutrients.

Consumers can readily see the nutrition facts panels on every bottle of glacéau vitaminwater, which show what’s in our product and what’s not. The success of glacéau vitaminwater is due in large part to consumers looking for a product like this to help support their healthy, active and on-the-go lifestyle.

Put simply, glacéau vitaminwater is a great complement to our often less-than-perfect diet with each of the different glacéau vitaminwater varieties providing a convenient, great-tasting way to get more of some of the vitamins and hydration we all need each day.

Public opinion on the topic is polarized, as you might expect.

So who do you believe? VitaminWater or the CSPI?

Is VitaminWater responsible or not?

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Image: The Coca-Cola Company