Advertisement for Starbucks in the Great Workplaces supplement given away free in yesterday's Guardian (but not a Guardian publication - it is published by an organisation with the unsettling name Redactive Publishing).
The advertisement celebrates the Starbucks "blend" of employees. A range of Starbucks paper cups is displayed, most of them with a name written on the side - the implication is that these are the names of Starbucks employees. The names are: Bob, Gemma, Liz, Daniel, Laura, Dave, Ben, Katie, Hayley, Amy, Sophia, Jonathan, Matt, Rich, Mark, Sarah, Tom.
These are all English names. There are no names such as Lukas, or Jolanta, or Svetlana, or Aminah, or Sharik, or Ohin, or Zahire, or Cheng, or Suhrita. The implication of this advertisement is that Starbucks in the United Kingdom only employs English people.
Unfortunately this is a lie. Starbucks has been heavily criticised for employing a migrants - to the point where it is very unusual to find a non-migrant Starbucks employee. The correct PR response to this criticism is to apologise publicly and say what steps are being taken to put things right.
The absolutely wrong thing to do is to issue an advertisement telling lies.
The Advertising Standards Authority requires all advertisements to be legal, honest, truthful and decent.
Complaints about untruthful advertisements can be made to the ASA on-line here: http://www.asa.org.uk/Complaints/How-to-complain/Online-Form/Step1.aspx
The Starbucks marketing director is listed as Brian Waring.
Not sure who did this ad. Their agency is listed as Kitcatt Nohr Digitas but I am not sure they were responsible. The ad is so amateur they could have done it in-house.
No comments:
Post a Comment