7 seats left:

Join us Dec. 1-3 in New Orleans for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit

SECURE YOUR SEAT

Golf Channel’s “Dream” A Social Media Nightmare

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:
Screen Shot 2013-08-28 at 1.54.19 PM

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.
Screen Shot 2013-08-28 at 1.52.31 PM

Not to be outdone, Staples similarly used MLK Day as an excuse for this silly tweet earlier this year.
Screen Shot 2013-08-28 at 1.52.51 PM

 

Image via Flickr

More in Marketing

TikTok dangles cash, credits and fully-funded deals to supercharge U.S. Shop spending

The platform has shared a plethora of incentives, to motivate sellers to spend more money.

Agencies are racing to offer zero-click analysis tools, but monetizing them isn’t easy

Marketing services companies are rushing to answer clients’ zero-click queries. The jury’s out on whether clients will pay for those answers, however.

Influencer partnerships expand, though unevenly across the creator economy 

The result is a creator economy caught between maturity and hesitation — growing up fast but not all at once.