Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

There’s something I noticed at Cannes.

And I’ve noticed it looking through everything recently submitted to Creative Works.

No laughs. Plenty of grit.

Under Armour from Droga5 New York. Strong women and gritty poems.

New Balance from BMB. Callum Hawkins grits his teeth and runs – 120 miles a week. “There are no short cuts to anywhere worth going."

Performance bike brand Specialized have made a film about kids with ADHD. From the gritmeisters at Goodby Silverstein.

Then there are the brands that want us to cry....

I empathize with these unlucky writers, though. Typos are inevitable. Sometimes, they tiptoe into my blog posts, and there’s nothing I can do about the embarrassment except lock myself in the nap room and wail into a pillow.

But the 20 pen slips below were so hilarious and shocking that my laughter pierced through all my colleagues' noise-canceling headphones. I couldn't stop chuckling at these editing blunders.

So, although our hearts sting for these writers, we decided to share their hysterical typos and grammatical errors. Hopefully, they'll forget the pain and laugh with us too....

There will always be times in the day when you are in desperate need of a caffeine boost, yet no where near the closest café. and for these times, mokase have comprised the answer to your caffeine-deprived prayers, in the shape of a phone case that converts your smartphone into an on-the-go espresso maker. using a simple system of a disposable insert which houses the coffee, and an app that heats it up on demand, the mokase pours out an espresso made by your smartphone.

On setting out to develop a product to brew coffee whilst out and about, Luigi Carfora and clemente biondo of ‘smart k’ had the idea of incorporating it into a gadget already carried around every day—the smartphone. the duo successfully designed a case that measures less than 1cm in thickness,  is completely waterproof and insulates the coffee when brewed. through a side slit in the mokase, the ‘mokaromi’ cartridge is inserted. the coffee—sealed within a vacuum on the inside of the cartridge—is freed when inserted into the phone, as the ‘spout’ breaks the membrane of the vacuum allowing the drink to exit....

If there’s one thing that wins me over in an advertisement, it’s effective use of humor. I mean, who doesn’t love a funny ad? I for one have been known to spend the better part of a Friday night looking up my favorite funny ads of all time and showing them to my husband for what’s probably the twentieth time. (It’s always funnier the twentieth time, right?)

Knowing that some funny ads might make your day a little brighter or serve as inspiration for your next project, the HOW team couldn’t help but curate a little collection below, including some old favorites, some we’ve recently discovered and some so weird you can’t help but laugh, plus a couple of vintage ads for good measure....

From these chaotic beginnings, search engine optimization matured and evolved as search engines became more sophisticated to screen out this kind of overt manipulation. Google makes at least 600 changes to its algorithms each year in an attempt to surface and prioritize the most useful information.

And yet the last few years of content marketing have had a similar dynamic at times. Some content gets published purely for search engine optimization. When every content marketer follows the same SEO checklists, all content can start to look the same.

It will be interesting to see the impact of the latest search engine advance. In 2015, Google announced RankBrain, an algorithm learning AI system, that is designed to think more like a human in ranking sites. It’s already the third top ranking signal....

Several people have figured out that the best way to get a message to President Trump is to do so via a TV program he is likely to watch, but no one has gone to the lengths that John Oliver has to get a television-based message to the president.

On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the first new episode since Trump’s inauguration, Oliver revealed that his show has arranged to run a Trump-targeted ad locally in the Washington D.C. market on all three cable news shows Monday morning, between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m.

Oliver made the announcement during a segment on the show called “Trump vs. Truth,” about Trump’s reliance on information gleaned from dubious and often false outlets like Brietbart and Infowars, and his alarming tendency to lie about easily-debunked topics such as his inauguration crowd size, much as he did for a decade about the ratings for his NBC series, Celebrity Apprentice....

It’s not that often that a billboard is so absurd that it invites widespread mockery and goes viral in the process. But this one has—a full six years after it was made.

The ad, from the Netherlands, was made by a Dutch agency called Etcetera for the Predictor pregnancy-test brand. With a quick glance, it’s clear something isn’t quite right. The man and woman seem extremely surprised by the reading on the pregnancy test....

United recently announced that it’s joining Delta and American in creating a new Basic Economy fare class, one tier below Standard Economy. This no-frills tier cuts a few of the remaining “frills” of Standard Economy, like overhead bins and pre-assigned seats.

It’s a move to help the major airlines compete with discount airlines like Spirit and Frontier. Spirit advertises itself as “a cheap seat for a cheap-ass” and models after Ryanair which famously considered charging passengers £1 to use the inflight toilet.

A lot of brands offer a continuum of basic to premium, but I think there’s risk to brands that try to stretch this far, literally from “cheap-ass” to first-class. Many travel brands in particular follow a model of low base prices and constant aggressive upselling. But in the process, they can forget all about the impact on customer experience.

Rafat Ali of Skift described how travel brands market to customers as “hate-selling”....

One day, we’ll have an entire Tumblr account for hilarious VR accidents, but until then, George Takei’s Facebook account will have to do. Takei, the Star Trek alum and current boss of sharing things on Facebook, recently shared a video of a man attempting to conquer a virtual cliff while inside an Oculus headset; it didn’t go well.

While climbing up a virtual mountain, the unnamed user had an unexpected fall — both in-game and in real life. The fall was a minor one, and it seems nothing is hurt but his pride.

The spill does outline a significant danger for virtual reality in that it might sometimes be too immersive. An immersive experience is what it’s all about, so it’s hard to suggest companies dial it back. Instead, maybe some genius out there can come up with a way to keep headset-wearers safe while they’re saving the world from pixelated zombies, or viewing some VR porn....

I once heard Seth Godin give a talk to a group of marketers in London. After this session, someone asked his secret to being so productive. Seth not only publishes books and starts ventures, he famously finds the time to reply personally to every single email he receives.

Seth replied simply, “I don’t watch TV and I don’t go to meetings.”

That really resonated with me. I’ve worked in organizations where more than 75% of every calendar day was blocked with internal meetings....

Bringing ideas to life in an organization can be a bumpy ride.

We’re all familiar with the myth of Isaac Newton sitting under the apple tree, waiting for inspiration to fall on his head. Newton’s apple is one of the more common symbols of innovation, right up there with Archimedes shouting Eureka from his bathtub. Metaphorically, that’s what we do when go to a brainstorming meeting to come up with new ideas. If the conditions are right, and the coffee strong enough, the next great idea just might fall on our heads.

What is often overlooked is what happens next, after the apple falls, when we have to actually bring that idea to life. If we’re not careful, Newton’s apple can turn into Newton’s applesauce, a watered down imitation of the idea. One of my first cartoons (back in 2002) was about this phenomenon.j...

Science has explained that the Earth rotates at 1,000 miles an hour at its equator, but flat-earthers are not buying it. Wouldn't people feel the rush of the rotation if the planet were spinning at that speed, you could ask.

Well, no, you wouldn't -- think about when you're an airplane or train ride that's moving at a constant speed, as astrophysicist Sabrina Stierwalt explained for Cornell University's "Ask An Astronomer." As long as it's a smooth, constant speed, you wouldn't feel any movements at all.

When you're on a flight, do you feel like you are personally blasting at 570 miles an hour through the air? You feel a change in speed, not a constant. If the Earth suddenly stopped moving, the atmosphere would continue to blast forward at 1,000 miles an hour, destroying everybody, according to NASA. Web comic XKCD's creator Randall Munroe explains the morbid aftermath in his book "What If?"...

Brand loyalty is more fickle than many marketers imagine it. Marketers often overestimate the role of consumer brands in consumers’ lives. In the world of FMCG, consumers are generally loyal to a repertoire of brands, not to a single brand.

This overinflated conception of brand loyalty can lead marketers to focus too much on current customers than on attracting new ones. In 2010, Byron Sharp rattled a lot of firmly held beliefs in marketing with his book, “How Things Grow”. He asserted that brand penetration is much more important than brand loyalty.

As Byron Sharp put it at an event last year, “We are loyal switchers. We don’t feel disloyal to Kellogg’s if we buy another cereal.”...