Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces saw a reported 65% jump in profits after being featured in the film E.T. as the candy Elliott uses to lure his new friend into his house. 

Here, the stories behind 10 famous product placements

PHOTO: YouTube

(Source: theweek.com)

Finally, a laptop pretty enough to entice women into using it! The ”Floral Kiss” laptop ”features a flip latch that can easily open the display — even by users with long fingernails.” It comes daintily adorned with gold and pearl designs, scrapbooking software and daily horoscopes. The whole thing is “insulting,” says Jenna Sauers at Jezebel — just like these 6 equally patronizing products designed for the ladies. 

The NFL had $9.5 billion in revenue in 2011, and they’ve donated a paltry $3 million to breast cancer? ”Pardon me while I don’t slobber all over the NFL’s pink-drenched marketing campaign.” -Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel. 

The NFL is coming under fire in the wake of a new report that accuses the NFL of profiting from the cause, arguing that most of the money from the breast cancer awareness push “ends up in the pockets of billionaire NFL owners.” The NFL refutes that claim. What exactly does the NFL’s breast cancer campaign do in terms of raising money and raising awareness? 

Is the NFL’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month a scam?

Top: Mattel’s affectionately dubbed “Drag Queen” Barbie was made to resemble her cross-dressing designer, Phillipe Blond. She comes complete with a mini dress, a full-length faux fur, and a heavily made up face. “I can already hear the complaints” about this being “an abomination,” says Michele Zipp at The Stir. “Don’t like it? Don’t buy it.

Bottom: Mattel and Nabisco thought they hit marketing gold when they paired America’s favorite doll with its favorite cookie in 1994. Selling in both grocery stores and toy stores, the Caucasian Oreo fun Barbie doll flew off the shelves. When Mattel introduced a black version, it was clear that the company hadn’t given much thought to the fact that the word Oreo can be derogatory — it’s used to describe blacks who are accused of being sellouts to the race.

When junk email became known as “spam,” Spam the pork-esque product faced “the greatest marketing challenge in its 75-year history.” Eventually, Spam embraced its inner punchline, rolling out an ad campaign with tag lines like “Glorious Spam!” and a mascot called Sir Can-a-Lot.

Result: Spam has thrived. Here, 7 other dramatic rebranding campaigns

All it took was a great idea — plus two years of testing — and Brazilian juice company Camp Nectar was able to grow actual fruit in the shape of one of its juice boxes, complete with an embossed logo and a bendy-straw protrusion on the back. 

The company created plastic molds in the shape of the juice boxes, then wrapped them around budding lemons, oranges, apples, guava, papayas, and passion fruit. They displayed the 1,123 box-shaped pieces of fruit in supermarkets to tout the fact that Camp Nectar’s juice is full of real fruit.

Watch how they did it. 

5 failed Obama campaign slogans

President Obama’s iconic 2008 slogan, “Change We Can Believe In,” isn’t a good fit for an incumbent, so this week, Team Obama rolled out what appears to be the official word of Obama 2012: “Forward.” This isn’t the first trial-balloon slogan Obama and his surrogates have trotted out, however.

Here’s a nostalgic look back at some catch phrases Obama auditioned, then pulled offstage:

1. Win the Future
   Team Obama broke out “Win the Future” in January 2011 to frame his State of the Union addressand fiscal 2012 budget. “He used the phrase (or a variant) 11 times” in his State of the Union address, says John Dickerson at Slate, but he was wise to drop it soon afterward. Win the Future “sounded more like the title of a self-help seminar, with Obama in the role of Tony Robbins,” than a governing vision. There’s also “that whole ‘WTF’ acronym to work around,” says Jazz Shaw at Hot Air.
    
2. We Can’t Wait
   This slogan appeared in October 2011, as Obama’s American Jobs Act floundered in Congress and he rolled out a series of initiatives aimed at unilaterally boosting the economy. Obama came up with this phrase himself, and it wasn’t bad, says Jonathan Chait at New York, but he needed to “hit the theme a little harder” if he wanted it to stick. After months of pushing “We Can’t Wait” measures, and using them to throw jabs at a do-nothing Congress, Obama wasn’t even able to make “high information voters” aware of the slogan.
    
3. An America Built to Last
   The White House unveiled this phrase as the theme of Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address. And thank goodness it didn’t last, says Lee Siegel at The Daily Beast. The slogan, apparently lifted from old Ford or Chevy ads, had a “weaselish quality” — instead of “framing a political vision,” it was “clearly” meant to address the swing voters in states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, the heartland of the U.S. auto industry. Obama can’t be all poetry, but “borrowing from decades-old car commercials is a new rhetorical low, and a futile one at that.”

“Hug Me” Coke machine dispenses free Coke when you hug it.

The world’s most unusual vending machines: A slideshow

Ikea has built an entire apartment… inside a Paris subway station. Five people are living there until January 14th as part of a creative marketing stunt meant to show potential customers what they can do with Ikea furniture in a confined space of only 581 square feet. Watch the time-lapse video.

Fashion retailer Urban Outfitters is in hot water with Native Americans, and possibly the law, for selling cheap knockoff “Navajo” products. But this is hardly the first controversy for Urban Outfitters, a store aimed at young hipsters and owned by big-time conservative donor Richard Hayne. Along with Navajos, the retailer has managed to offend blacks, Jews, liberals, conservatives, and eating-disorder groups, among others. Here’s a look at eight of Urban Outfitters’ biggest controversies:

• Ersatz “Navajo” fashion
  In the latest flap, Sasha Houston Brown, a member of the Santee Sioux Nation, is asking Urban Outfitters to pull its “distasteful and racially demeaning” line of Navajo-labeled clothes and accessories. The Navajo Nation holds 12 trademarks on the word “Navajo,” including for clothing, and a 1990 federal law prohibits falsely suggesting that products are made by Native Americans. These “blatantly racist” knockoffs clearly aren’t, and they’re tacky to boot, Brown says in an open letter to CEO Glen Senk. “I doubt that you consulted the Navajo Nation about using their tribal name on sophisticated items such as the ‘Navajo Hipster Panty.’”

• The “Obama/Black” T-shirt option
  In January 2010, Jezebel editor Anna North noticed a T-shirt for sale on Urban Outfitters’ website in two color combinations: “White/Charcoal” and “Obama/Black.” Urban Outfitters said they “screwed up, and are sincerely sorry,” explaining that they had internally developed a color called “Obama Blue” that accidentally appeared on the website. “Fine, Urban Outfitters: You’re not racist, just careless,” says Univeristy Chic. But given your history, and penchant for making controversial political statements, “you can’t blame anyone for assuming” the worst.

• The “Eat Less” T-shirt
  The next group Urban Outfitters offended was… well, anyone who thinks it’s a bad idea to sell a V-neck T-shirt with the words “Eat Less” on it, displayed on a “rail-thin brunette model in a hiked-up miniskirt,” says Ryan Halliday in FOX Boston. There were enough of those people that, after a backlash, the shirt was pulled from Urban Outfitters’ website in June 2010. But not its stores, says Amy Odell in New York. But hey, at least it’s not as blatant as the shirt sold elsewhere displaying Kate Moss’ old slogan, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”

Read the whole list