Category: Media and Marketing

Media and Marketing

150th-birthday campaign: How to play the Jack Daniel’s whiskey barrel scavenger hunt

Starting Friday in its Lynchburg, Tenn., hometown, the Brown-Forman unit is hiding 150 prize-filled whiskey barrels across the globe at historic and cultural sites, with clues on Jack Daniel’s Facebook pages to help fans find them.

The clues, tied to the history of each region, will be revealed on the day of each local Barrel Hunt, and barrels will be opened when the first person to arrive gives the correct password. The hunt is a social-media marketing centerpiece of the distiller’s 150th anniversary. It runs through Sept. 30.

Photo, top: A barrel gets the Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 brand.

How important is Jack to the company?

It’s the only one of Brown-Forman’s product lines to be Continue reading “150th-birthday campaign: How to play the Jack Daniel’s whiskey barrel scavenger hunt” →

Media and Marketing

KFC debuts an ‘extra crispy’ Col. Sanders impersonator

And it’s perpetually tanned George Hamilton, the fourth actor to play KFC founder Harland  Sanders since the chain revived his character last year.

The new commercials start airing Sunday, KFC says in a press release. Jim Gaffigan, who followed Norm MacDonald and Darrell Hammond, will continue as Sanders in marketing for Original Recipe chicken.

The campaign by Wieden+Kennedy will include four spots — two at 30 seconds, and two at 15 seconds — all airing nationally. The ads feature Hamilton as the colonel with an exaggerated suntan to emphasize his “extra crispy” character.

“I like to think that I know a thing or two about being extra crispy,” Hamilton said in the press release. “One could argue that my entire career has been leading up to this role.”

This isn’t the first time Hamilton, 76, has agreed to do a self-mocking TV spot. In 2003, he promoted oven-toasted Ritz Chips and toasted Pita Thins.

Media and Marketing

Long-time CJ columnist Kay, who pioneered cutting-edge features and loved lavender, is dead at 87

Joan Wood Kay’s “Speaking of People” column helped turn the traditional society and women’s pages into an “issue-oriented features section that was nationally admired,” said retired Courier-Journal editorial page editor Keith Runyon. Kay worked for the paper for 34 years, ending in 1987. She died Sunday at 87, the CJ said this morning.

Speaking of People ad
Kay at her typewriter in 1969.

In a 1969 advertisement, the paper told readers Kay’s column was the “up-to-the-minute and very much ‘with it’ successor” to the paper’s old social notes stories — like this one from Aug. 5, 1917:

“Little Miss Virginia Gray Montgomery was honored with a party Wednesday afternoon when her grandmother, Mrs. James W. Montgomery, asked the future belles and beaux to an al fresco affair which she gave at her home on Shelby Street. The children presented a lovely sight in their dainty white dresses  with varicolored ribbons on bobbed heads. . . . The large galleries were festooned with ropings of red, white and blue, and flags were hung in the pergola. Toy balloons and baskets of candies were the favors given.”

Writing this morning about Kay, another long-time CJ correspondent, Sheldon S. Shafer, said: “Kay had a keen appreciation of art, especially impressionist and modern, and she was an avid reader of mysteries and newspapers. She was skilled at needlepoint and knitting, and was a world traveler who wrote humorous poems and limericks for friends. She also acquired a vast collection of teddy bears. She spoke Italian and French and was always fashionably dressed — often in her favorite color, lavender.”

Herman Meyer & Son Funeral Home is handling final arrangements.

Media and Marketing

The CJ reveals the tick-tock plan for how it covered Ali’s death
Muhammad Ali
Ali in 1967.

The Courier-Journal’s Muhammad Ali news coverage immediately after the prize fighter died near midnight on June 3 was more than a decade in the making, the paper’s editor said today, in an inside account of how it came together. The New York Times literally stopped the presses to get the news in print. The Louisville native was buried in Cave Hill Cemetery amid a celebrity-studded memorial service after he died in Phoenix following a decades-long battle with Parkinson’s disease; he was 74.

Media and Marketing

Cowboy in tux“A tuxedo with work boots: All-new Ford F-Series Super Duty King Ranch Platinum Editions offer premium vinyl flooring option.”

That’s the headline from a Ford Motor press release this morning, promoting an option for customers wanting a $75,000 luxury truck that can double as a work truck “without fear of damaging the interior.” The photo, below, is the one the marketing department at the employer of nearly 10,000 Louisville workers suggested news outlets use — which, of course, is why we opted for the gratuitously hotter one, above.

Vinyl floor option

Media and Marketing

52 years later, the CJ apologizes to a young man named Ali
Muhammad Ali
In 1967.

“We took what in today’s light is an oddly hostile approach on the specific issue of Ali’s name, which did little to help race relations in a turbulent time.”

— The Courier-Journal, in an unsigned editorial this morning, belatedly apologizing for the newspaper’s waiting so long to use Muhammad Ali’s adopted name, after he rejected the one given at birth: Cassius Clay.

The editorial followed a New York Times article Thursday, pointing out this failing on the part of many papers, the Times included. The Louisville paper’s apology is certainly welcome. But was it prompted by the Times story? Or was it already in the works?

Worth noting: In a search this week, the first “Ali” reference Boulevard could find in the CJ’s online database was a page-one story in 1969, five years after he’d chosen the new name. But that’s incorrect; “Ali” appears the year he adopted it — 1964 — although editors didn’t take it seriously until many years later.