Gap logo: a PR stunt gone right?

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

Call me a conspiracy theorist if you will, but can it really be true that Gap was actually planning to use its new, terrible logo?

I don’t think so. I think its PR gurus headed off to a retreat to work out how to generate free publicity with the minimum of effort, downed a few double-strength lattés and gazed at the blue sky. And someone came up with a quite ingenious solution.

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Stretching the truth by snipping the figures

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Here’s something that winds me up. This is a graph that was published to accompany a high-profile hardware launch last year. I won’t name names, but you can probably guess who produced it and what they were trying to show:

As you can see, across various tests the red bar is three, four, even six times as tall as the green one. But hold on — because that’s not an accurate reflection of relative performance. (more…)

Save the world! Read about hard disks!

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

I’m all for innovative marketing, but I think Toshiba’s hard disk team may have gone a little mad. Head over to www.harddiskdriverevolution.com and you can play a game all about – well, it’s obvious really – saving the world through the medium of hard disks.

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Buzzword Bingo is back

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

For anyone who had hoped that Buzzword Bingo had jumped out of the same 10th floor window as the dotcom investors who excelled in playing it when the bubble burst a few short years back, sorry but I have bad news: it is alive and kicking. The proof can be found within my email inbox every single day as there is always at least one press release that dispels the notion that given enough time monkeys and typewriters can produce meaningful prose (with apologies to sign-reading chimps everywhere.)

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