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  1. Why marketers and PR gurus need rehab

    Why marketers and PR gurus need rehab

    With her rise to fame, amazing song writing and of course the celebrity status the Amy Winehouse story has always intrigued me. Her death came as a great shock to the world, and I have purposely let the dust settle on the story before I wrote this.

    One of the things I look for is how the media and marketers use these types of events, and I was so disappointed by the way the media, advertisers, PR professionals, social media experts and marketers used her death to raise their own profile and profits.

    Let’s have a look at some of the culprits:

    1.Microsoft
    Microsoft’s Twitter account run by Microsoft UK PR was first to capitalise on the singers death. The first tweet advertising that we ‘remember by downloading’ sent on the Sunday was one of many met with fury by fans.

    amytweetbox360

    Responses to the above tweet to the account called @tweetbox360 were Shaney Hudson who suggested: “Vile leeches- seriously?” And Stuart Houghton tweeted: “Stay classy Microsoft PR jackals.”

    The tweet was then taken down, and replaced with an afterthought several hours later. Oh dear.

    2. Amazon
    Many online retailers including Spotify, Apple and Amazon all leapt to post what looked like obituaries throughout their online music stores to remember Amy. All of the links, banners and advertisements didn’t link to her official website or MySpace, Q magazine, Mojo or NME fan pages. You guessed it, they linked directly to their in-house Amy Winehouse E-commerce store.

    amy-winehouse-amazon

    3. PR
    If you’ve not seen the blog submitted to the Huffington Post written by Scottish PR expert Tricia Fox, the loss of Amy was turned in to a business lesson. If you’ve not seen this yet, then do check it out, it was a real shocker and a seriously bad decision.

    This tasteless blog caused uproar on the Huffington Post site and on Twitter. The post to date received 124 Comments, 611 Facebook shares, 1,123 Tweets, 77 emails and 26 Google +1s and that was on the Huffington Post site alone.

    Tricia recently said in The Drum that she tried to take the post down from the internet newspaper, but surely we know by now that once it’s out there, there’s no turning back?

    Fox said “In retrospect I wouldn’t have posted it. I didn’t know about ‘linkbaiting’ until Sunday night… The Huffington Post tell bloggers to make posts topical – they’re the ones benefiting.  I searched but there is no way to take it down.”

    What have we learned?
    Amy told us that love is a losing game, but sometimes profit is one too. The backlash worldwide to these campaigns tell us there is a big difference between profiting from someone’s death, and attempting to profit from her death.

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    • Posted on August 18, 2011 by Adam Keene

      Amy Winehouse is simply the latest in a long line of artists/film stars that have had their work extensively promoted following their death.

      It must be said though that some of this money makes it to the estate of the individual and is seen as the last chance to make a high level of income from them. Tragic but true.

      Adam

    • Posted on August 20, 2011 by stevelhm

      Apple were another culprit. The iTunes store was completely restyled within hours of the news. She was in the top 10 by the end of the week.

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