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Blagger's Blog— RIP Chewy, Coca Cola uses synaesthesia, Ancestry lacks history lesson

“He just radiated happiness and warmth.”

Mark Hamill, AKA Star Wars hero Luke Skywalker, paying tribute to the actor Peter Mayhew, who died this week aged 74. Mayhew played everyone’s favourite Wookie, Chewbacca, in the fifth highest grossing media franchise of all time.

 

Weekly High

Coca Cola has long been a master marketing brands, and this latest campaign is no different. Harnessing the power of ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response), or synaesthesia, a series of print ads challenge the audience not to ‘hear’ what they depict. It works, because you can’t unheard the sound of a glass bottle opening or bubbles fizzing.

Weekly Low 

Ancestry— the company that helps people trace their family tree— has come under serious fire for its latest advert, which people have slammed for its racial connotations. Now pulled, it depicted a guy asking his lover to run away with him to Canada and escape a life of servitude in pre-emancipation America. Criticisms have ranged from the fact Canada was also involved in the slave trade, to romanticising the horrors of that era and white-male-saviour syndrome.

Need to know 

The YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project surveyed 23 countries and found that Britons were the least trusting of social media platforms.

Facebook has announced bans of well-known extremist commentators including Alex ‘Infowars’ Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos.

The UK Government has kicked off a ‘year of marketing’ by publishing a manifesto for change— identifying issues such as the expanding millennial workforce, growth of flexible working hours and forthcoming 5G network rollout. 

From our blog

https://smokinggunpr.co.uk/did-earth-hypocrisy-brands-saving-world/

https://smokinggunpr.co.uk/podcasts-pr-marketing/

https://smokinggunpr.co.uk/new-marketing-agency-demographics/

https://smokinggunpr.co.uk/snapchat-influencer-marketing/

https://smokinggunpr.co.uk/april-2019-smoking-gun-hq/

https://smokinggunpr.co.uk/manchester-pr-agency-papers-overlooked/

 

Blagger’s Blog— Smoking Gun’s weekly roundup of media news, sans effort. 

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