Ryan's Marketing Roundup- April

April started with a fool and has ended with an airline that has taken the theme of the month quite literally. I thought I would concentrate on some attention grabbing adverts and touch on the mammoth nosedive from United Airlines on how not to do customer service.

April Fool’s Day on the 1st gives the chance for brands to create something a little bit mischievous and get the public talking about whatever fun idea they've put out there. I managed to spot a few different adverts that had captured the imagination below; my favourite by far was BBC Three’s fantastic ‘new’ show with David Attenborough- ‘Life of Grime’. This caused a real stir on social media and even had the biggest artist in Grime right now Stormy mistook this for being real, voicing his unhappy thoughts to BBC Three but then realised he’d been fooled and had to apologise!

Subway thought they’d launch their new range of Ice Cream flavours to the nation, the SUBzero range. The range included the three flavours- Meatball Marinara, Tuna and Chicken Tikka. Sounds great right?

Moving on from some light hearted brand fun to something a little more serious. A video surfaced showing a 69 year old man being dragged off of a packed United Airlines flight on the 10th April. The flight had been overbooked so they decided to remove the man from the airline as he refused to give up his seat. The Chief Executive of the company Oscar Munoz had released a public apology but it came to light that a different message had been sent out in a letter to the employees stating the man had been ‘disruptive and belligerent’. Not only did this add fuel to the fire but it then brought into question the professionalism of those running the company. As well as people calling for a boycott of the airline the shares for their holding company had plummeted, and to top it off it was trending as number one talked about thing on China’s version of Twitter, Weibo. And they say no press is bad press… 

On Easter Sunday, McDonald’s tried to pry you away from having an Easter egg for breakfast and dropped a sponsored Facebook advert into my timeline, I must say I was tempted.

And finally the last novelty bit of marketing I spotted this month was by Tennent's Lager. On the 21st of April, it was National Tea Day (seriously I haven’t made that up) Tennent’s Lager had a slight twist on the day and had their own sort of ‘T’ day. Just in case you were wondering the 'likes' outweighed the emoji face!

I hope you enjoyed a more visual roundup for April and here's to an eventful May. Feel free to let me know if there was anything that caught your eye this month!