BERLIN – Somewhere in Canada, Charlie Angelakos, marketing head of the Labatt beer brand, may have just faced the most uncomfortable meeting he ever had with his bosses. Because his department made one, but crucial, mistake: it tried to get the Montreal Gazette to take down a picture on its site featuring Luka Rocco Magnotta, porn actor and alleged murderer, holding a bottle of Labatt Blue beer.
Angelakos asked that “in view of the nature of the story” the picture be removed and another, Labatt-less picture of the alleged killer be used – and promptly unleashed a galloping case of what is known as the “Streisand effect.”
According to this rule, asking for the removal of any reference or image, particularly online, automatically engenders the high-profile publicity you hoped to avoid by asking for removal – indeed much more publicity than you would have faced if nothing had been undertaken. What’s more, because it’s online, it hangs around for much longer than anything in the print or visual media would.
Magnotta, dubbed the “Canadian psycho,” is suspected of having killed a Chinese student, cut up his body, and sent the parts out in parcels by mail. The alleged killer, having fled Canada, was arrested in an Internet café in Berlin.
Essentially, albeit unwittingly, Angelakos has cemented Labatt beer, for the foreseeable future anyway, in the minds of consumers as “killer beer.” The photo has now been copied thousands of times, posted on blogs, featured in media reports. And tweeters are going crazy outdoing each other on #newlabattcampaign with snappy lines such as: “I’d give an arm and a leg for a Labatt.”
Read the full article in German by Benedikt Fuest
Photo – DennisVanStaalduinen
*This is a digest item, not a direct translation