This little film was produced by the outdoor advertising industry in the 1940s, and is a great slice of urban history, including some good footage of early public transit. It shows some classic product ads, vintage Chicago street scenes and antique vehicles, along with a crash course on how outdoor advertising works.
Years ago, I used to teach public relations courses called Reputation Management to corporate suits. When I singled out companies that had somehow managed to weather bad press to emerge with reputations well intact, there was one at the top.
That company poster child was, hands down, Johnson & Johnson.
In fact, for many years the Forbes list of 100 Most Admired Companies featured J&J as their perennial list-topper. And the exemplary way the company had swiftly stick-handled its catastrophic Tylenol murders scandal in 1982 continues to be taught in PR, journalism and crisis communications classes.
But those heady days must seem far, far away now, with increasing reports of tainted J&J drug recalls. As Consumer Reports Health describes it, a nauseatingly bad smell to its products has been blamed for stinking up several different types of Tylenol, the antipsychotic drug Risperdal, HIV/AIDS drug Prezista, and two lots of the anti-epilepsy drug Topamax among many others. In fact, the agency reports that recalls like these have cost J&J almost $900 million in sales last year alone. Continue reading
We didn’t decide on a name for our first baby until he was 10 days old. My mother flew out to the West Coast from Ontario on that tenth day to discover, horrified, that my husband and I were still referring to her only grandchild as just “The Baby“. For example:
We eventually, at my mother’s insistence, decided to give him a real name: Benjamin, which satisfied our only criterion (a three-syllable name that could be shortened to one syllable). Continue reading
