Connect with execs from The New York Times, TIME, Dotdash Meredith and many more

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

WTF is ‘Google Zero’?
The era of “Google Zero” — industry shorthand for a world where Google keeps users inside its own walls — is here.

The next browser wars are here — and AI wants the ad dollars too
Perplexity and OpenAI are getting ready to take on Google’s Chrome, but will need a solid ad business to keep their browsers ticking along.

Vista Equity Partners’ TripleLift implements ‘significant’ layoffs
The latest round of layoffs is understood to have impacted all departments at the SSP across multiple geographies.