Plume and Petal falls flat
This week’s solution to a non-existent problem brings us a new vodka range ‘specifically for women, by women’. Clocking in at 20% – or half the standard abv of vodka – Plume and Petal seeks to ‘redefine a girls’ night in’ and address the ‘real-life demands of a modern woman’.
Bacardi claims 65% of people drink low- or no- alcohol drinks and this was no-doubt a botched attempt to tap into that market. Apparently, it took eight years to perfect the recipe, but it raises the question of how little time and how few conversations went into the marketing and communications around the product. And how many people were involved in the process of signing off such a tin-eared campaign. If it’s any consolation, Bacardi now says it is ‘not proud’ of the language used in the release.
Welcome to 2020, Bacardi. Have you looked out of the window?
Daily Mail appoints PR firm
Recently, someone at the Daily Mail woke up and realised that the divisive tabloid has something of a PR problem.
It might not seem an urgent issue – in May, the Daily Mail overtook The Sun as the UK’s bestselling daily – but the newspaper that brought us the famous ‘enemies of the people’ headline and attracted universal condemnation for its reporting of the personal and legal troubles of Caroline Flack will need to address both the long-term decline in print sales, as well as reluctance amongst some advertisers to be associated with the controversial brand.
This mammoth task falls to creative agency St Luke’s which has won the £5m account. Congratulations and best of luck.
Vodafone lockdown
Months indoors has created a nation of banana-bread baking, Duolingo downloading, bassoon playing hobbyists. We’ve developed a sudden, fervent interest in all sorts of things we could have already been doing, but weren’t.
In one of the best campaigns of the year so far, Vodafone highlights that “even when we can’t be close, we can be together”. It shows how our days are now reconfigured with connectivity at the heart. Learning, exercising and socialising have all moved indoors, supported by screens. This ad – filmed entirely in lockdown – shows just how adept we have all been at adapting to the monumental changes that this year has thrown at us.
To top it all off, it raises money for The Red Cross.