The Big Fat Marketing Blog

What started as a typical tabloid stunt - a photo of Michael Phelps puffing on a bong pipe - has turned into a competition suspension and a sponsor disconnect with moral overtones for America’s super-swimmer.

“Michael’s most recent behavior is not consistent with the image of Kellogg,” Kellogg spokeswoman Susan Norwitz said in a statement. Of course, that’s subject to change if Phelps the pothead becomes Phelps the multi-medal man once more. Tony the Tiger good, marijuana man bad, sums up Kellogg’s moral marketing message here.

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This is an interesting MSNBC story in that it includes, gold, bribes, bad press and panic. The story claims a guy wrote a blog post on Cash4Gold that was less than flattering. It took hold and took off. Then, as the story goes, the company tried to bribe the blogger to take down the site, just a few short days before their multi-million dollar super bowl spend.

Ahh, the power of the web.

This is an interesting MSNBC story in that it includes, gold, bribes, bad press and panic. The story claims a guy wrote a blog post on Cash4Gold that was less than flattering. It took hold and took off. Then, as the story goes, the company tried to bribe the blogger to take down the site, just a few short days before their multi-million dollar super bowl spend.

Ahh, the power of the web.

You might not think of the newspaper food section as the perfect place to promote an animated dark fantasy movie. But “Coraline” literally cooked up the right recipe to do that.

The movie—adapted from a book by Neil Gaiman by “The Nightmare Before Christmas” director Henry Selick—is about a young girl who feels ignored by her over-worked mother. She retreats to an alternate version of her life through a secret door in her new house. Naturally, this paradise isn’t quite so nice as she initially thinks.

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I’ve been a fan of T-Shirt Hell (WARNING: A lot of not safe for work material here), and I’m not afraid to admit it. I’ve never ordered a t-shirt from them, but I’ve been amused and/or shocked by the t-shirts they’ve produced since 2001, and looked forward to their e-mail updates when new products arrived.

The founder (Sunshine Megatron, formerly known as Aaron Landau Schwarz) claims he’s not a victim of the awful economy, and claims to be selling more than 3,000 t-shirts a week. He instead says that he’s getting out because of the hate mail he’s been getting from consumers telling him his products are in bad taste. more