Join us Dec. 1-3 in New Orleans for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit
It was just a matter of time before some tone-deaf brand used today, the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, as a social media marketing ploy. Amazingly, the guilty party was the Golf Channel.
This morning, as @jyarow pointed out, the Golf Channel tweeted:

MLK was most likely not talking about hitting the links when he said he had a dream. The Golf Channel has since deleted the tweet.
The Golf Channel is a property of NBC, which is running the broader “DreamDay” hashtag. But something about mixing golf programming and historic civil rights events struck many online as a catastrophic duff.
This isn’t the first time a brand has attempted to glom onto the historical and social importance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s groundbreaking speech. Last year Taco Bell shamelessly plugged itself in this dream-themed tweet.

Not to be outdone, Staples similarly used MLK Day as an excuse for this silly tweet earlier this year.

Image via Flickr
More in Marketing
The CMO-CCO split is becoming a corporate fiction
The longstanding divide between marketing and communications is eroding — not with a bang but with a slow, steady merging of responsibilities.
‘Clicks don’t pay the bills, pipeline quality does,’ becomes LinkedIn’s case for its pricey ad prices
LinkedIn’s head of ads measurement, Jae Oh, explains why he believes the platform is “phenomenally cheaper” than others in the market.
Ad Tech Briefing: Digital Omnibus is about to land — here’s what it means for GDPR, and the future of ad targeting
The EC’s Digital Omnibus could redefine data rules — and shift power in digital advertising.