By Linda Forrest
I can’t help but share what I think is a brilliant PR campaign by Dr. Pepper. The company has agreed to give every person in America, except for Slash and Buckethead, two guitarists who have famously quit working with Axl Rose in various incarnations of the band Guns ‘n Roses, a free can of Dr. Pepper if the band, such as it is, puts out its long awaited album Chinese Democracy before the calendar year is through.
A little history on Chinese Democracy. It has been in production, supposedly, since the early 1990s. Every six months or so, Axl Rose says that it’s just about complete and that it will be released shortly. Then, some sort of internal strife or label struggle causes an incalculable setback and the album never comes out. Suffice to say that since Bill Clinton had just entered office when production began, Americans will have to find other ways to quench their thirst as it’s improbable, to say the least, that 2008 will be the year that the fabled album makes an appearance.
Okay, so it has little to do with B2B PR, but it is nonetheless a terrific strategy that’s circumventing a lot of the gatekeepers and barriers to coverage that would traditionally exist for a corporate behemoth like Cadbury Schweppes in reaching its target demographic of males 18-34. Kudos to Ketchum for developing and executing this creative campaign.
The tenuous connection between inmedia and a music-themed PR campaign is that in a former life, I worked in public relations for a variety of record labels and recording artists. For those of you playing the six degrees of separation game, I’m the link here, folks.
By Francis Moran
With one foot of this agency firmly planted in Scotland but with a long and fond personal attachment to Cape Breton, the heavily Scottish-tinged northern part of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, I am loath to choose sides in a trademark dispute that earlier this week saw the Federal Court of Canada order Cape Breton’s Glenora Distillers to stop marketing its locally-distilled single malt whisky with the word “Glen” in its name, something to which Scotland’s Scotch Whisky Association had taken grave exception.
Despite the fact that place names beginning with “Glen” are as liberally sprinkled across Cape Breton — indeed, across much of Canada — as sheep on a Scottish highlands hillside, it would seem the SWA believed that using the word in the name of a whisky unduly confused the market. The Scottish distillers trade association said it had found about 30 instances where Glenora’s Glen Breton Rare Whisky was mistakenly identified as Scotch whisky, although its news release failed to provide examples and there was no suggestion the Canadian distillery itself ever did so.
The professional marketer in me was intrigued by the trademark battle but the student of Scottish history in Nova Scotia was saddened that such a turf war would ever be necessary. Atlantic Insight, a long-defunct monthly news magazine in Atlantic Canada, once dubiously assigned this freelance journalist of undiluted Irish heritage to write about the cultural legacy built up by Scots throughout Nova Scotia and especially Cape Breton in the more than 200 years since the first major wave of Scottish settlers came ashore on the Hector in 1773. In many respects, the language, music, dance and literature of the old country was more alive and vital in the new world. For example, among the sidebars to the cover story that eventually ran was a piece on an elderly seanachie, or traditional Gaelic storyteller, whose skills were so outstanding that he often was called upon by groups in Scotland itself to teach his craft in a country where the language was at that time in some danger of being entirely forgotten.
Not that I think it very likely, but God forbid they ever forget how to make whisky in Scotland; after this ruling, they’ll get a frosty welcome should they ever have to turn to their natural heirs in Cape Breton for any guidance.
