The courts have agreed that Johnson & Johnson’s lawsuit against the Red Cross over the use of the red cross was one of last year’s top 10 dumbest marketing moves.

J&J, which also uses the symbol, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan against the American Red Cross and four of the charity’s licensees, seeking to prevent them from using the “Greek red cross on a white ground,” claiming that it is a trademark violation and that the humanitarian group was barred from using it for commercial purposes. But U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff disagreed, noting that the American Red Cross had used the emblem for more than a century and was authorized to do so by various Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Congress.

I really want to know who got the job of telling the board of directors, “Oh by the way, we’re suing the Red Cross.” There was no possible good outcome from this. Even had they won in the courts no consumer without a law degree would have understood it.

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf,” Bush said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

My head hurts from this quote.

Dear George, you want to show solidarity with these families? How about you visit each and every one of them. Maybe explain why neither you nor your children have served in this or any other war. How about adequate funding and administration for the Veterans Administration? How about not being an idiot? How about not starting wars on fictitious grounds?

Good Lord.

McCain? Hillary? Obama?

I’ll take any of them over this fool.

Not Huckabee, though. I can’t live through another administration that views facts as malleable.

In an effort to have their vaguely pizza-like product and eat it too, Papa John’s “issued an apology to Cleveland and the Cavaliers for making T-shirts with LeBron James‘ number and the word ‘crybaby’ under it.“  On Thursday Cleveland residents will be able to get a large, one-topping alleged pizza from the chain for 23 cents, James’ jersey number. The company is also kicking in $10K to a charity sponsored by the Cavaliers.

Second prize is two Papa John’s pizzas for 23 cents.

Yes I know there are places in this nation where Papa John’s is considered good pizza. I weep for those places. In Boston we have places that have already been closed by the Health Department that make better.

Is it a brand war or a cat fight? Islanders from the Greek island of Lesbos are suing the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece because its name “insults the identity” of the island.

“My sister can’t say she is a Lesbian,” said Dimitris Lambrou. “Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos.”

1. Never EVER get into a fight with a Lesbian.
2. You don’t get better branding than this. Open a Subaru dealership, put Martina on every tourist ad you can and buy your sister a house on Thassos.
3. You can’t win.

Hey, they originated the Potemkin Village, right?

Russia’s southern region of Ingushetia is trying to overcome its reputation for bombs, murders and shootouts by paying for a glossy supplement featuring strutting dancers and smiling mothers. The eight-page, full colour supplement entitled “My Favourite Republic” appeared inside copies of the popular Moscow newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda on Tuesday. … “Ingushetia, it is an amazing, beautiful region,” the supplement said on its front page. “You could talk about it endlessly.”

Or you can believe what the US State Department says about Inqushetia and the rest of the Caucasus:

Throughout the region, local criminal gangs have kidnapped foreigners, including Americans, for ransom. U.S. citizens have disappeared in Chechnya and remain missing. Close contacts with the local population do not guarantee safety. There have been several kidnappings of foreigners and Russians working for media and non-governmental organizations in the region. Due to the ongoing security concerns, U.S. Government travel to the area is very limited. American citizens residing in these areas should depart immediately as the safety of Americans and other foreigners cannot be effectively guaranteed.

I went to ComeBackAlive.com, the website for Robert Young Pelton who writes The World’s Most Dangerous Places and was very disappointed to find only very dated material on Russia and its dangerous places. Tsk, Tsk, Robert. CLARIFICATION: Actually the site does have more recent info, it’s just that when I used the search function the first page and a half or so of results were all for the site’s DangerFinder archives. Once I did a search for Chechnya -DangerFinder, I got the new stuff. Now I’m just disappointed with the site’s search function, not its actual content.

As you know, we here at The Damage are hot on the latest developments in toast-shaped products. However, we also do our due diligence which is why we, unlike those actually paid bloggers at Gizmodo, knew that this Archie McPhee product was an April Fools joke. (In fairness it must be said this took some painstaking research: I clicked on a link.) Astute readers will note this is simply a photoshopped version of McPhee’s less-expensive and only slightly less-baffling inflatable toast pillow.

In a recruitment effort, Microsoft is giving out decks of cards with the phrase “Hey Genius” emblazoned on their backs. The fronts are a standard deck of cards but each describes different MS products or initiative the putative genius could work on. Now where I come from you only say “Hey genius” when someone has truly, truly proved they are anything but. My favorite card, from an irony standpoint, are the jokers both of which tell people that they might be forced to work on Zune, the company’s not-yet-closed attempt to compete with the iPod.

Further proof of Redmond’s tin ear for irony can be found in the following:

MSN China has invited users of its messaging service to put a red love heart followed by ‘China’ in front of their names to support the Olympic Games.

I mean, they’ve got to be kidding, right? I certainly hope MSN users in the rest of world have the option of using that symbol of the red circle with the line through it.

How much do the official sponsors of the Munich Beijing Olympic games wish they could remove their names from being used on any ads outside of The Middle Kingdom. For once I am going to tune in to watch the coverage of the games, not the games themselves. It will be a fascinating moment to watch all these sports reporters have to cover the ongoing political insanity.

Speaking of which, here’s one story that hasn’t hit the press here in the West yet. Seems the China is doing a major effort to remove gays and lesbians from Beijing.

AIDS activists and gay rights supporters in China have sounded an alarm following one of the largest crackdowns on gays and lesbians in Beijing, evidently as part of a “clean-up” ahead of the Olympics.

The idea that Beijing is removing gays and lesbians and then having thousands of Olympic athletes come to town shows that the Chinese have a very … um … closeted view of what goes on in the Olympic village. It has also been reported that prostitutes are being “cleaned out” of Beijing, showing that the Chinese really don’t understand how to get on the media’s good side.

Bounce® and Beyonce? Jay Z and Oral B®? 50 Cent and Febreze®? Snoop Dogg and Eukanuba®? Ghostface Killah and Ghost®? Lil Wayne & Pampers®? The synergies are … totally non-existent — but what else to make of the following:

Consumer products giant Procter & Gamble is getting into the hip-hop business by launching a record label with Island Def Jam Music Group.

Unfortunately the brand that has caused P&G to flirt with getting funky is not Mr. Clean or Swiffer or any of the other billion dollar babies. No, it’s Tag — a me-too brand whose raison d’etre is confusing consumers into not buying Unilever’s Axe. What is odd about this entire thing is it smacks of the sort of stunt marketing that’s the antithesis of Jim Stengel and company’s mantra of growth via solving consumers’ problems. Ah well, when you make as much money as they do you can afford to do some loopy things now and then.

Talk about your mixed messages.

Found this at AdFreak:

The front cover of the card features two glasses of wine held by two hands and reads, “pardon me….” On the inside is printed, “care for some liquid clothes remover?”

Sadly what brought this to the attention of the press was NOT the fact that there is no mention of safe sex procedures. No, this got noticed because some outraged person viewed it as promoting promiscuity among teens. (Something, it should be noted, that’s about as tough to promote as water among the Bedouin.)

[ Cyndi] Desrosiers said she first saw the card in a Dover [NH] Hallmark store in an area designated for a “RED” line of cards, from which proceeds are reportedly spend to combat AIDS in Africa. “I find it ironic given that they’re promoting sexual promiscuity,” she said. “The target audience, in my opinion, is young adults.”

What is not at all clear is why Ms. Desrosiers thinks that the card is aimed at the young and the restless. Has red wine become all the rage among the youth of today? Or maybe sending greeting cards? Hallmark can only hope.

Ms. D brought the card and her complaint to clerks at two different card stores in NH. Apparently the concept of the clueless customer is always right is well ingrained in the Granite State. Both clerks removed the cards from the shelves.

Let’s see you try that in Boston. We’ll curse you out just for buying the damn thing.

The DC subway system ran an ad featuring a bobblehead version of Pope Benedict. The ad was an effort to get fans of his Holiness to take the train when Benedict comes to town next week. (He’s not coming to Boston. “It’s not a big college town.”) The ad is fun. As the plastic Pontiff rides the train, a man seated next to him chants IN LATIN, “Thank heaven for Metro.”

Later, the narrator says, “Avoid the unholy traffic and take Metro.”

Here is the amazing quote from the story:

“Our concern is that this was a bad bobblehead,” said Susan Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Washington. “You had unauthorized merchandise, and you had a misdressed pope.”

Apparently the Vatican views selling bad bobbleheads in the same light as Martin Luther once viewed selling papal indulgences.

Good news for the Metro is that this GUARANTEES the video gets more views than it would have otherwise.

BTW, the misdressing?

The bobblehead in the Metro video wears a red skull cap, known as a zucchetto, and a red cape. “Popes don’t wear red skull caps,” and they don’t wear red capes, only white ones, Gibbs said.

Well, EXCUUUUUUUUUUSE ME. Who died and made you Pope? Oh, wait, never mind that last one.

Go here if you want to order your own incorrect version of Pope Bobblehead the First.

(Insert contractually obligated mention of my attempt to get my copy of Lives of the Popes back from Churbuck here.)

So Absolut is apologizing to US consumers for an ad that most of them have never seen. The ad that in Mexico and shows a map of the Americas with the parts of the US that once were part of Mexico as STILL a part of Mexico.

The campaign, which promotes ideal scenarios under the slogan “In an Absolut World,” showed a 1830s-era map when Mexico included California, Texas and other southwestern states.

Apparently, some people at conservative columnist Michelle Malkin’s web site posted angry comments about this and called for a boycott. (Michelle Malkin fans angry? Who’da thunk it?*) As a result Absolut apologized for the ads after they stopped running.

This is dumb for a number of reasons.

1. Absolut has been absolutely fearless (by corporate standards) in its willingness to be identified supporting gay men and lesbians. If that’s part of your brand you don’t dump it just because of some whiny Wingnuts.
2. This is one where you don’t have to apologize, just say look they’re not running anymore. You say it’s over and then ignore it. Apologizing just puts fuel on this fire.
3. Name me a boycott that has worked in the last 20 years. Name me one that has even actually generated any sustained PR problem.
4. This apology sure isn’t going to go down well among Mexican consumers. As a matter of fact if I were a citizen of Mexico (Motto: “Too far from heaven, too close to the US”), I would see this as another example of someone ignoring my interests as a result of US bullying.

Y’know even cynical little me was surprised to find out exactly how insecure some of my fellow Americans are. Let’s here it for the USA (Motto: We Can’t Take A Joke).

*I am not going to say that either the Wingnuts or the Crybabies have better or worse columnists, but I will say that the Wingnuts seem to have a monopoly on the truly entertaining crazy women columnists.

Yep, she set herself up for another one. She really needs to get a comedian on staff to help her avoid these things.

“Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit. I never give up.” No matter how tired the audience gets…

When I recently bought a new computer I got a Lenovo — causing me to be named Customer of The Year by the online CMO. I got the Lenovo in part because I love ThinkPads and in part because they made it very easy for me to get Windows XP. Below is a picture of a product that sums up the feelings of many of us. I suspect it may be a better TP than an OS.

From Open for Discussion, McDonald’s corporate responsibility blog:

In my remarks, I mentioned that the founder of McDonald’s, Ray Kroc, and Dr. King both demonstrated persistence and determination through their care for others and the sharing of the beliefs that shaped their philosophies.

And fries. They both liked french fries.

That quote is so wonderfully vague that it is all-encompassing. You could substitute anyone’s name for Kroc’s in that sentence and still have it be true.

There is probably no one Disney ride/attraction I loathe more than “It’s A Small World.”

It brings together all the worst of Disney & theme parks into one package.

In design terms it has a banality and mediocrity that makes it possible to forget these are the same people that brought us Oswald the Rabbit, Pinocchio, the early Mickey Mouse cartoons and a host of other wonderful works of real art.

It also has the problematic racial issues that litter the Mouse’s history: Song of The South, Epcot’s bizarre and historically inaccurate Eurocentric history lessons, an animatronic Native American village — (personally I was hoping Euro Disney would have an animatronic shtetl). In Small World the racial problem becomes that all the people of the earth who are not already Caucasian appear to have undergone a severe loss in melanin. Small World’s many deficiencies are wrapped in a song I can only compare to the aural equivalent of mixing Twinkies & Spam.

Given all this you would think it impossible to make the attraction* any worse. But NOOOOOOOO. In what seems to be a complete violation of Small World’s saccharine “we’re all alike” will now include a nice cuddly display of nationalism.

Mrs. Collateral Damage — aka The Queen of All Disney Media — quotes the following:

And in one of the most egregious and downright disgusting decisions in Disney theme park history, the gorgeous New Guinea rainforest scene, replete with some of Mary Blair’s most whimsical character creations (a crocodile with an umbrella, colorful birds hatching from eggs) and her drummer children with Tiki Masks on the opposite shore will be replaced with a Hooray for U.S.A sequence.

Now don’t get me started on the whole tiki masks thing and the gross condescension towards indigenous peoples — anyone surprised that we don’t get cute caricatures of any Christian religious images?

I really think Disney should go the whole way with this redo and insert a display of gross nationalism for every nation. Then they could have a follow-up ride called “It’s A Small World War.”

BTW, the headline is a quote from one of my favorite Disney attractions: Muppet*vision 3D.

Kermit the Frog: We will also see a rousing finale from Sam the Eagle. What’s it called, Sam?
Sam the Eagle: It’s called “A Salute to All Nations, But Mostly America”.

*or is it a ride? that’s one of those distinctions that the Disney-centi are very particular about.