
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

Meta’s Threads ads arrive fast, but advertisers move at their own pace
Threads ads are here, and so is the predictable wave of testing.

Privacy fatigue is setting in after Google’s cookie U-turn. But the search for alternatives hasn’t stopped
Third-party cookies are still widespread but they’re no longer foundational. The shift is already underway, it’s just no longer waiting on Chrome.

Confessions of a media buyer on Google’s third-party cookie U-turn and how it helped a ‘largely lazy’ industry innovate
For media buyers, it’s been a wild time filled with false starts, urgency and many delays to an ever-extending deadline.