Grande apologises again; might have more work to do

We've tried to stay aloof from Ariana Grande's whole 'licking doughnuts while saying I hate America' incident; and the botched apology.

But we can't sit idly by while she apologises for the first apology:

She says: ‘I feel like in the apology I posted, I missed my opportunity to sincerely apologise and express how I was feeling because I was preaching about my issues with the food industry.

‘Seeing yourself behaving poorly is such a rude awakening. I was so disgusted at myself.’

You could have seen yourself behaving poorly by watching the video through before you slammed it up on to YouTube. Just a thought.

Still, she's contrite now, right?

She goes on to say she behaved out of character, and that she understands she is being judged for her actions.

The singer ends with 'I’m human, I’ve still got a lot to learn and I still make mistakes.

‘I’m not making excuses, I am here to apologise’.

You might think "I'm only human and learning" is making an excuse, but I suppose we can consider this as close to a proper sorry as we're going to get. She doesn't actually apologise; she just says she's here to do it, but you have to take what you can get.

And let's be fair to her - her actions were driven by her disgust at the American food industry and its promotion of unhealthy lifestyles.

I wonder why she started with doughnuts, though? She could have started with the soda companies, the home of empty calories.

Why would she not have started her campaign with, oooh, let's say Pepsi?

Ah. Okay, so that might be a little awkward. How about the takeaway business, though? Maybe Grande could say something about how terrible all those fried chicken joints are. Perhaps she could do that on stage at an upcoming date. She's got some dates coming up, right?

Okay. Fair enough. Maybe licking doughnuts is all she can do without harming her bottom line.

Gordon in the morning: Fizzy

This morning, Gordon Smart seems to be running a nothing story about Beyonce simply as an excuse to crowbar in her Pepsi advert:

THIS could be good news for BEYONCE fans.
Thousands were left disappointed at the weekend after tickets to her UK tour sold out in just 12 minutes.

But you can bet that isn’t the last of it and she’ll play another big gig this summer.

And no doubt she will be bringing loads of promotional Pepsi stuff with her, like this pop art-style ad, below right.

I suppose you could, at a stretch, suggest the ticket sales story was worth a report, but the Sun had already run one, and this happened on Saturday, so if it was news, surely it should have appeared in The News Of The World Whoops No It's Not Called That Since We Were Caught Listening To A Murdered Child's Phone Calls On Sunday?

So what's with the unpaid Pepsi ad? Could it be an attempt to sweeten relations with Team Beyonce after Saturday's somewhat less than positive story on the tickets?

Aerosmith really like football, or cola, or something

It's not just that you can picture the marketing meeting where this idea was choke-dropped onto the table; it's the way you can see the pie-chart of "intersecting communities" being drawn on the interactive whiteboard, and hear the whooping:

Pepsi and the National Football League (NFL) announced the expansion of the Pepsi NFL Anthems program, a national campaign that brings to life originally created anthems for seven NFL teams around the league. The latest world-renowned artists to be featured in the program include one of the generation's most influential artists, Lenny Kravitz, who penned "Like a Jet" for the team he grew up cheering for in New York, and America's Greatest Rock Band AEROSMITH, staunch supporters of the New England Patriots, who have released an anthem titled "Legendary Child - Patriots Anthem".

If you're telling people it's an anthem, it probably isn't. If you're having to stick the word "anthem" in the title, what you've probably written is a jingle.

If you can stand the violent interpolation of a can of fizzy drink and a bunch of dinosaurs into enthusiasm for people playing sports, there's much more joyless clunk to be discovered in the promotion.

In an ongoing effort to amplify the intersection between sports and music, we are thrilled to add AEROSMITH and Lenny Kravitz as the newest Anthems artists," said Pepsi Director of Sports Marketing Todd Kaplan. "On top of that, the Jets and Patriots have a notorious rivalry, and we couldn't have picked a better matchup to debut our new songs and advertising campaign."

Let's not doubt for a moment that there is an intersection between sports and music, albeit one whose value sits somewhere between the Hoddle and Waddell single and that comedy record by the bloke pretending to be John McEnroe.

But why and how would one "amplify" it? To what end? And if it's such a vibrant cross-section that you think it should be shouted about, why would you have to pay people to write songs that fit it?

Joe Perry explains why Aerosmith got involved:

"This is a program the band and I were excited to get behind as it is a true representation of our allegiance to the New England Patriots and the city of Boston," said AEROSMITH frontman Steven Tyler. "There's something about the word legendary and the words New England Patriots that have an amazing ring to them. We're excited and proud to be part of that," added AEROSMITH guitarist Joe Perry.

That sentence. That one right there: "There's something about the word legendary and the words New England Patriots that have an amazing ring to them." That is the marketing project equivalent of finding dead fish washed up on the beach, a warning sign that there's absolutely nothing able to breathe in the environment.

There's something about the words 'marketing' and 'patronising bullshit' that taste a little of Pepsi, isn't there?

Gordon in the morning: Canning One Direction

When even Gordon Smart is pointing at your work and calling it "cringeworthy", you must have really stunk the place up.

So it is with the One Direction Pepsi advert. Let's look at the advert, shall we?

There are so many questions here.

If all these people are so bloody successful, how come they're incapable of coming up with the idea of getting a Pepsi from somewhere else? "We can summon crowds of cheering people from thin air, but are incapable of looking for our PR - who, to be fair, is probably hiding in the corner - and asking them to sort out a can of soft drink."

There's only one of Man From The Sports. But there are more than one of One Direction - I suspect there might be as many as four or five, although they're so bland and indistinguishable it's hard to tell if there's lots of them or just a few moving about a bit. Are One Direction really planning on sharing a can of Pepsi between them?

The pay-off is crazy. Everyone knows you don't give the other boyband members the bribes to become a member of a boyband, right? It's usually the managers who you'd be offering the sticky, sickly treat to.

But mostly: what were Pepsi thinking? Is there anything more off-putting than putting a bunch of people into a room and getting them to bore on about how astonishingly brilliant they are? (And doesn't it make a nonsense of the very idea of having celebrities in your advert if they have to explain who they are?)

Nice to see the Pepsi tradition of 'awkward men dancing badly in the final frame' is upheld, thought.

I collect, I reject: Michael Jackson's hair

Here's something for the person who has everything, but sense: The chance to buy Michael Jackson's hair, salvaged from the Pepsi advert shoot and up for auction:

Unaware that he was on fire Michael continued to perform until Executive Producer of the Pepsi commercial, Ralph Cohen, rushed to aid him. As seen in the infamous video, Cohen threw his Armani jacket over Jackson's head to help extinguish the flames.

Michael was taken to hospital only after reassuring the 3,000 strong audience that he was ok.

On removing his jacket Cohen found Michael's hair attached to the inside lining. The lot comprises strands of the hair retrieved by Cohen.

3,000 people watching a man film an advert for a fizzy drink - but only one got some hair. Apparently, which he kept.

The starting bid being sought for this is £100. Which might sound ridiculous, until you hear that Justin Beiber's hair is going for £20,000. Double what a flag signed by Castro and Guevara would cost you.

[via @stokesie

Yoko Ono suggests charity promotes the Lennon brand

Pepsi are currently running a charity campaign in the US. Causes looking for funding can bid, encourage people to vote for them, and if they're at the top of the poll at the end of the month, the charity gets the cash.

It's perhaps a bit unfortunate that Pepsi decide to turn their generosity into a gameshow, but for small charities, it's an extra avenue of potential funds so it isn't all bad.

But hang about: what's this?

YOKO ONO is urging JOHN LENNON fans to celebrate the late BEATLES star's 70th birthday by voting for his Educational Tour Bus to win a $250,000 (£156,250) charity grant.

The mobile recording and multimedia studio enables youngsters in the U.S. to record their own music, with sound engineers on hand to help students produce projects.

Ono wants to take the initiative global to coincide with what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday in October - and she's eyeing a cash sum from the latest Pepsi Refresh Celebrity Challenge.

So this bus - splattered with the Lennon brand, you'll notice - needs less than £200,000 to get on the road.

Couldn't Ono write a cheque for that without even breaking a sweat, instead of throwing the bus into a battle for a limited pot of cash against other groups who can't draw on the name of a dead pop star to push their cause? It's a bit like staging a Beatles gig in the same village at the same time as the fete to raise funds for the new Church roof, surely?

[If you want to vote for someone, why not vote for Denver's splendid Center For Hearing, Speech and Language's literacy project?]

Pepsi repackages

It's still a nasty multinational company flogging unhealthy products, but I couldn't help being impressed with new look Pepsi is rolling out for its colas. After years of pushing cluttered, ugly tins with pointless digitised splodges and whatnot all over, they've decided to start acting like an iconic brand and produced a crisper, cleaner design for the cans and bottles. Not only that, but The Apples In Stereo are soundtracking the new campaign.

It's the same horrible PepsiCo. But they've smartened up their presentation.

Billy Corgan feels his integrity has been slighted

Virgin records used Smashing Pumpkins as part of the Amazon-Pepsi giveaway promotion, which hasn't pleased Billy Corgan. He feels it slights his integrity:

"Its a frustrating situation honestly to be treated so poorly by a label where we had so much success," the band's singer, Billy Corgan, said in a written statement.

"Recently they have ignored our pleas to give our fans special editions of our old albums, telling us they weren't interested so there is a tremendous amount of hypocrisy involved with them turning around and using us like this," Corgan said

The lawsuit asserts that Smashing Pumpkins "worked hard for over two decades" to build goodwill with fans damaged by Virgin's use of its music and image in the campaign.

Virgin could, conceivably countersue that the current Corgan-only version of the Pumpkins is doing more to ruin the band's integrity than anything they could manage.

WalMart and Target turn Pepsi blue

The link-up between Pepsi and Amazon to give away squillions of free mp3s has hit a problem: US Retailers have taken the hump at giving shelf-space to a promotion for a company they see as a competitor.

This is bad for Pepsi - in-store pushing of the free mp3s has been scanty at WalMart and Target - but worse news for Amazon who have been airbrushed out of the picture to keep retailers happy:

In an apparent response to retailers’ concerns, Amazon’s name has been banished from the front of Pepsi bottles carrying the promotion – rendering it invisible in supermarket aisles to passing shoppers.

Similarly, Amazon’s logo is on the back of cardboard multi-pack cartons of cans that are stacked on the shelves of mass discounters and supermarkets, next to the product’s bar code and nutritional information.

Considering this was Amazon's big push to trumpet its new download service outside of the Geekosphere, that's got to be a big let-down. No figures yet on how many tracks have been given away.

1,000,000,000 free songs for the taking

Some crazy give-away madness from Amazon is being set up next year: a billion free MP3s.

Well, up to a point - Pepsi are planning a promotional push that will see five billion of their products shipping with a code; five codes will be swappable for a free mp3 download off Amazon. We'd imagine that Pepsi will be somewhat upset if every single bottletop gets used to grab a free track, even at the 40 cents that Amazon is trying to persuade the labels to accept in return for the songs.

Certainly, experience from both MyCokeMusic and a Pepsi/iTunes tie-up suggests that dentists will see more action as a result of the pop-and-pop linkage than will Amazon.

In other mp3 news: WalMart is rumoured to have told labels that if they don't start to provide them with un-DRMed tracks, they'll find walmart.com won't be stocking their wares.

An environmental impact

At least with Live Aid, you couldn't prove that Adam Ant was taking food from starving Ethiopians. But how green are those involved in Live Earth? We've just pulled together a few notes:

Madonna

Housing
Madonna owns seven properties, scattered around the world, each taking space that could be used by other families and requiring upkeep even while sitting empty. [WebIndia]

Appeared in adverts for The Gap
The Gap is praised for being an "Environmental Protection Agency Climate Leader" in the US under the government's voluntary code for setting targets for reducing carbon footprints. However, the company hasn't actually achieved its (self-imposed and somewhat soft) targets, which makes it less a climate leader, more a whisky priest [Climate Leaders]. Furthermore, it sources clothes from around the world, adding needless journeys shipping sweaters and boxer shorts from continent to continent.

"Designed" for H&M
Leaving aside the question of if having a industry based on needing a complete new set of outfits every six months can ever be sustainable, H&M have been manufacturing clothes in Asia for the last thirty years [China Textile News 11th May 2007], and are stepping up their operartions in India, despite not actually having any retail outlets there. So everything made in the Indian stores will be shipped thousands of miles across the planet. [Images Retail]. H&M have pledged to reduce their carbon emissions, but have created a formula which means they will measure their success as "relative to sales" - in other words, they could happily keep increasing their CO₂ emissions while claiming to be reducing them. [H&M].

Provided soundtrack for Vauxhall and Peugeot car adverts

John Buckley estimates Madonna's personal carbon footprint at 1,018 tonnes, 100 times the average British impact, and "[t]he[..] singer's Confessions tour last year produced 440 tonnes of carbon pollution in just four months, simply in flights between venues. This does not include the trucks required to transport equipment, the power needed to stage each show, or the transport for fans travelling to each concert. [Daily Mail]

The Police

Housing
Sting has several homes, and often holds meetings which require people travelling from London to Wiltshire; his partner Trudi Styler boasted to Architectural Digest that their Wiltshire home consumes a vast amount of energy: "There’s nothing out of bounds, no feeling that anything is Mummy’s best furniture—and plenty of heating. I think we could heat the entire hamlet with what we’ve put in here." The house was extensively reworked by an interior designer flown in from New York for the job - presumably, nobody knows how to scatter cushions in Wiltshire. [Architectural Digest]

Advertised S-Type Jaguar
Sting's Desert Rose video was reshot as an advert for Ford's S-Type Jaguar - the top model managing a pitiful 22.5 miles per galon while spewing out 314 grammes of emissions per kilometre. [Honest John]

Sheryl Crow
Advertised Subaru four wheel drives
Every Day Is A Winding Road used as soundtrack for ads

John Legend
Lexus adverts
Music used in adverts for Lexus cars

Joss Stone
Appeared in adverts for The Gap
The Gap is praised for being an "Environmental Protection Agency Climate Leader" in the US under the government's voluntary code for setting targets for reducing carbon footprints. However, the company hasn't actually achieved its (self-imposed and somewhat soft) targets, which makes it less a climate leader, more a whisky priest [Climate Leaders]. Furthermore, it sources clothes from around the world, adding needless journeys shipping sweaters and boxer shorts from continent to continent.

Pepsi
Pepsi is signed on as a major sponsor for Live Earth [Pepsico corporate website]. One of Pepsi's major businesses, Aquafina, sells water drawn from mains in bottles, an indefensible waste of bottles, distribution, and energy. Pepsi's Chinese business has been criticised for releasing waste products into the water resulting in a blacklisting [Polaris Institute] and was named as a serious polluter by the non-governmental The Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs [IPEA] and are being investigated in Kerala after pesticide residues were found in some products [Polaris Institute]. The Pepsi bottling plant in Madhurawada was banned in 2006 from using groundwater after complaints about "the predatory exploitation of groundwater by the Pepsi bottling unit, the pollution being caused by it, the unsatisfactory way in which effluents were being treated and other related issues." [IndiaResource] In 2004, the US Environmental Protection Agency was forced to order the company to improve procedures at its Tucson bottling plant. "The company's facility lacked effective management practices or an adequate containment system, which allowed storm water to come into direct contact with industrial pollutants -- such as oil and grease -- from its truck fleet before entering municipal storm drains and the Rodeo Wash. The Rodeo Wash flows to the Santa Cruz River, a tributary of the Gila River and the Colorado River." [Environmental Protection Agency]

Microsoft
MSN is a key sponsor of the event; parent company Microsoft's policy of producing increasingly processor-heavy programs and attempting to use its near-monopoly to enforce upgrades of equipment to cope with the heavier software means hundreds of thousands computers are discarded every year by people who need newer equipment to do exactly the same things they were doing with their old machines. [Green Party warns of Vista Landfill effect]

The Live Earth environmental impact
Artists will fly a total of 222,623.63 miles to attend the various concerts
Carbon footprint of event, including expected TV audience: 74,500 tonnes
1,025 tonnes of waste will be generated
[Daily Mail]

The last temptation of Jack White

Jack White may or may not be playing Elvis Presley in a Jake Kasdan movie, Walk Hard. White's publicist, though, is a bit vague about it:

[They] confirmed that Jack "did take part in this movie", but would not elaborate as to whether or not he actually plays Elvis.

Perhaps the vagueness is understandable - of course, Jack White has been bought up by the Coca-Cola company, while Pepsi is the official drink of Elvis Presley.

The official soft drink of Graceland, by the way, has been approved by the Presley "Licensing Division":

"Charged with the responsibility of protecting and preserving the integrity of Elvis Presley and other related properties."

And nothing says integrity like selling your illustrious corpse to a soft-drink company.

Adding to her long list of crimes against rock

The duck face toy; the nanny calling the police; now - Kelly Flogs Pepsi [Real] - are you really sure she's rock and roll?

Get busy with the fizzy

Sony and Pepsi are linking up to formalise the artist-by-artist fizzy drink endorsement arrangements in the US. Now, Sony artists are hooked to Pepsi, and Pepsi are hooked to Sony Artists.

Now, this wouldn't be so much of a major leap forward if it wasn't for the way Tommy "Put some clothes on, Celine" Mottola is choosing to see this as going beyond the usual - picture of artist on multipack boxes; semi-naked artist in Pepsi poster; small 'Pepsi sponsors' logo on tour ads; artist photographed swigging Coca-Cola; awkward press conference.

Mottola claims:

"Our goal in the end is to create a much larger distribution platform for ourselves. This is the beginning of a new model. I'm sure it's going to cause a result."

Okay, okay, we could point out the multi-million pound business brain has just said there's going to be a result, which is obvious - even the Light Brigade got a result when they made their famous charge; more puzzling is what he actually means when his forked tongue curls round "create a larger distribution platform."

Because the key aspect of the deal is that when you pop in to buy some Pepsi - or its delicious alternative styles - you'll find massive dump bins of free CDs to take home and pass off to your relatives as Christmas gifts ("and sample new artists and albums").

We're confused, though. Haven't Sony and the RIAA been saying that free music is bad? That because music is available for free through the Internet, nobody will buy records any more? And people will take the tracks and burn them to CD-Rs, which is bad? So their response is to save them the time and effort of downloading and burning, and just giving the CDs to them straight off?

Now, in the old days, we'd imagine that Sony were looking to create interest in their artists by offering people a chance to hear their music, in the expectation that this will drive sales later. But the RIAA have been most clear in their pronouncements about MP3 that allowing people to hear music for free doesn't drive sales, and only creates the demand for more free music. We're confused.