Wheelhouse’s Weekly Top 5 | August 20 – 24
Top 5 Marketing, Advertising, Social Media, Technology & Life Happenings This Week
Facebook Announces Yet Another Data Leak: Facebook has been making headlines recently for a lot of things, not many of them good. This week they revealed that nearly 4 million users of the app myPersonality may be at risk of a data breach. Sheesh. This was flagged by the ‘book when myPersonality refused to comply with a company audit and it was discovered that they sold the information of Facebook users to researchers and third-party companies.
Cambridge Analytica came under fire for this earlier in the year, accessing profiles of certain people and their friends – myPersonality did not take this route, reports Variety. For now, myPersonality has been disabled by Facebook and anyone who may have been affected has been notified.
Facebook has been having a rough 2018, as many of us are aware. Marky Mark Zuckerberg better get his sh*t together here soon or they’re gonna be in for a rough couple of years.
Procter & Gamble Taps into Millennial Verbiage: LOL SRSLY? We all buy Procter & Gamble (“P&G”) products – think Tide, Cascade, Iams, etc. – whether we know it or not, they are everywhere. No problem, they probably don’t need a boost in sales, right?? WRONG. They are currently in the works for trademarking some of our favorite Interwebs terms like LOL, NBD, FML and WTF. Why, you ask? They want to use them in their cleaning and air freshening products, of course! Bloomberg reported earlier this week that a new board member to P&G has criticized them for being slow to respond to rapidly changing consumer preferences.
They have recently adapted to buying more “natural” products which are hitting home with millennials in the era of buying everything organic. This new board member is making a bold move here, but the company declined to comment on the move anyway. Will trademarking these incredibly popular, staple terms actually attract these younger buyers? We shall see.
Kroger Jumps on Anti-Plastic Bag Train: Many cities across the US have adopted a fee for shoppers who use plastic bags instead of bringing their own (looking at you, Walgreens & CVS) but Kroger has announced recently that they will skip that step and ban them altogether. Now, of course this is great for the environment. Similarly, Starbucks, Disney, Marriott & McDonald’s have recently banned plastic straws to #savetheturtles. The shopping giant orders 6 billion bags each year, reports Fox News. 6 BILLION. That is a lot of bags to all of the sudden decide not to use. Which is why they are giving themselves until about 2025 to make the change in full.
The Cincinnati-based company operates 2,779 stores in 35 states and the District of Columbia, serving almost 9 million people daily, Fox News states.
I mostly use these bags to pick up my dog’s number twos…but I see and respect this move by Kroger.
Net Neutrality is Back on the Docket: Nearly half the states in our great union’s attorneys general are again asking an appeals court to bring back net neutrality, TechCrunch reported earlier this week.
Back it up – what is net neutrality? A nearly unanimous law that was passed back in 2015 during the Obama era which provided for an open, fair and competitive Internet for all users.
Why are we trying to appeal it now? On December 14, 2017, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to repeal the strong net neutrality rules.
These attorneys general seeking to appeal the 2017 decision represent states totaling 165 million people, which is more than half the U.S. population. If rolled back, it would allow for monopolies to begin and for internet speeds to slow waaaaaaay down.
Reuters reported that Mozilla, Vimeo and Etsy joined forces this week to file a legal challenge. There are laws being passed at the state level which allow for net neutrality to keep chugging along so don’t worry, guys, the government has your back here.
Google Creates Fake Brand, Tests Advertising Strategies: Lol. Google, you sly dogs. Only Google, and their company Unskippable Labs, could create a fake pizza brand, serve up some fake ads on YouTube and reach 20 million real impressions. TechCrunch reported this week that Google was pushing the limits, using a fake brand, to see how far they could go in advertising a new product. Have you ever seen someone eating pizza and looking directly at the camera in a Domino’s ad? No, me neither. That’s what they were going for – the freedom to be very, very wrong.
In accordance with a professor at Brigham Young University, the ads were created to answer a few questions: do sensory cues have an effect on the reach of an ad? And simply – how much human presence there should be in food ads. I could go on about this, but I don’t want to plagiarize, so please read more about this in the link above. Their findings were incredibly interesting and will make you appreciate your advertisers even more when they think of the craziest ideas for your next ad.
