Why Is Toyota Sending ‘Journalists’ On A Lavish Vacation To The Olympics?
Clearly, Toyota wants coverage for its Olympics sponsorship—why
wouldn’t it?—and admittedly the chance to interview the athletes at the
Games is very exciting. You get to capture all of their excitement,
anxieties, rage and triumphs as they’re happening. It beats conducting
an interview over the phone for sure.
But that being said, if this
was truly the experience Toyota wanted journalists to have, then why
include all the vacation shit? Why a visit to the fish market and a
polar bear swim? What do those things have anything to do with Toyota,
the Olympics, sponsorships or the athletes? It makes the coverage seem
secondary to the VIP experience, and one wonders how these
journalists—who are not sports journalists, by the way—will have time to
get any meaningful journalism done in between all the fancy dinners and
“mega-sauna” experiences.
As for how Jalopnik got this invite, I will speculate a bit here, but
I suspect this was in part a PR fuck up. Toyota probably outsourced the
duty to the marketing agency, sent instructions about the event, told
them to build a list of outlets to invite and to handle the travel
details. Yet, that agency was still acting on behalf of Toyota, so we
can also assume that Toyota was in agreement with everything that it was
doing, including the wording of the original invite.
That’s
the same invite that went out to all the outlets, though! Which means
that there are journalists who saw it and accepted this fairly egregious
bit of access journalism anyway.
Let’s
not act like this is some Toyota-specific issue. Every automaker does
shit like this. But this trip’s purpose is even more dubious in value
for the automaker than most others and its return on investment is
extremely questionable.
(Jalopnik.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment