(CavemanCircus.com)
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
There's Always A Method To The Madness
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)
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)
This Is Absolutely Genius!
German man buys 2 Smart cars just to keep driveway clear
Neighbors say they've been parked there for at least three years.
(AutoBlog.com)
Neighbors say they've been parked there for at least three years.
(AutoBlog.com)
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