Oreo’s #BestieBond campaign is the PR winner

 26th June 2014    Good and Bad PR 
 Paarul Chand

Good PR

Oreo cookies creates fan driven content with #BestieBond

Oreo used the concept of friendship to push their Orange Chocolate cookie. In a Twitter based campaign, Oreo first asked friends to send their selfies with friends.

But the campaign quickly went beyond the selfie peg, using the selfie to kick off a larger messaging point about friendship and the Oreo chocolate orange cookies. Using the #BestieBond hashtag, Oreo created fan driven content by asking Tweeples to tweet about their besties.

This was then converted into picture tweets:




A great way to celebrate fans and convey the core properties of the cookie. This one gets a thumbs up from Good and Bad PR for going beyond selfies for a campaign.

BBC bureaus protest sentencing of Al-Jazeera journalists

BBC bureaus, along with hundreds of journalists around the world, took part in a protest against the seven-year jail terms given to three Al-Jazeera journalists in Egypt. A Cairo court found Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed guilty of spreading false news.

Here is the protest by the Delhi BBC bureau:


Photo: BHASKER SOLANKI

The Pakistan BBC bureau:


Photo: @TheHaroonRashid, BBC World Service News

Bad PR                     

Colgate’s Visible White Selfie campaign fails to shine

Ok, enough already with the selfie based campaigns. Colgate’s latest campaign around its Visible White toothpaste asks users to post their selfies using an app that whitens their teeth:


 

While the campaign ties in well with the core message of the product, the selfie is overdone now, just like crowd sourced campaigns. Besides, I tried the app and frankly could not see any great difference in the picture.

This campaign gets a great big yawn. It’s way too hot to go around whitening your teeth in pictures.

Health Minister’s, morals not condoms line, gets short thrift from HIV/AIDS activists

Public health communication is always tricky issue. The polio campaign in India faced a lot of opposition because of a belief that the polio drops could cause infertility. Similarly the HIV-AIDS campaign in India has been tough because of the stigma attached to the disease. Promoting the use of condoms among the truckers population in India has been an important cornerstone of preventing HIV-AIDS.

Now Dr. Harsh Vardhan, the newly anointed Health and Family Welfare minister, says that promoting condom usage should not be the focus of anti-AIDS campaigns.

"One should also promote integrity of sexual relationships between husband and wife – a part of Indian culture,” said Vardhan in an interview to the New York Times.

The fact is that NACO – the nodal agency that combats HIV/AIDS in India has worked very hard to promote condoms among vulnerable populations that include truckers and men having sex with men.

Any dilution of this campaign is dangerous and impractical, the assumption being that sexual relationships can only take place between a husband and wife. In India the biggest causes of the spread of HIV is not only migrant truckers but also sharing of needles – unlike Uganda where multiple sex partners was the main cause.

The minister has since clarified his statement saying that he meant to only promote the UN approved mandate of ABC – Abstinence, Be faithful, and use a condo. But that still doesn’t explain his definition of relationships as one between a husband and wife. 

Given the BJP’s right wing affiliations and the track record of sundry right wing groups that target women in pubs and unsuspecting couples on Valentine’s Day; the health minister needs to exercise greater care while communicating about such a complex issue.

This statement gets thumbs down.

Have you seen any good and bad PR?

Write to Paarul Chand at paarul@prmoment.in or tweet @PaarulC or @PRmomentIndia throughout the week and we’ll happily credit you for your trouble.