Many jokes of questionable (at best) taste followed last week’s death of Anna Nicole Smith. So did marketing opportunities, such as this pitch, posted on Gawker: “I was wondering if you had any plans for a story in response to the Anna Nicole Smith news today. If so, I work with the Waismann Method – an opiate detoxification center – and I wanted to make available to you two of our addiction specialists…”
On the other hand, opportunities may be narrowing for TrimSpa, the weight-loss product for which Smith had been a spokesperson. As branding expert (and CHIEF MARKETER columnist) Robert Passikoff told CNNMoney.com, “When you mention TrimSpa, the image that came to mind was Anna Nicole Smith and that’s the difficulty with being so closely tied to a celebrity.”
It doesn’t help that a TMZ photo shows that Smith kept in her refrigerator cans of rival weight-loss product SlimFast alongside cans of TrimSpa—and just above a carton of methadone.
Let’s move on to cheerier topics…say, the funny pages. So far product placement hasn’t made much of a splash in books (though several years ago novelist Fay Weldon stirred up controversy by accepting payment from jeweler Bulgari for repeated mentions of the brand in her imaginatively titled novel “The Bulgari Connection”). Bucky Katt of comic strip Get Fuzzy shows how J.K. Rowling could have made even more money with “Harry Pfizer and the Goblet of Flagyl.”
We didn’t have the Harry Pfizer books when I was a kid. But we did have the Goodyear blimp. I grew up just a few miles from the small airport that was the blimp’s Philadelphia home, and as I was telling my seven-year-old the other day, sometimes my family would drive to the airport to catch a closer look at the blimp. After hearing this anecdote, my daughter gave me a look of unadulterated pity, the same kind of look I’d no doubt given my mother when she told me about growing up without television. So while my daughter’s not excited about the return of the Goodyear blimp, I am. And apparently so is Goodyear. As an exec told Brandweek, “”We are going to change every touchpoint from here on to match this campaign.”
From aircraft hangars to apparel hangers: MediaPost’s Marketing Daily reports on EcoHangers, a partnership among In-Home Media, several national marketers, and 35,000 dry cleaners “to provide marketing-message-branded, environmentally friendly dry-cleaning hangers to replace traditional wire hangers.” I’d insert a Joan Crawford joke here, but MediaPost beat me to the punch(line).
Sherry Chiger is editor of CHIEF MARKETER REPORT and sister publication Multichannel Merchant. She rounds up her favorite marketing stories every other week for “Chiger Chooses.”
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