Paid Promotions: Cases that backfired (Part 1)

A popular method of promoting a company’s products or services is by paid promotion. Usually it is best to pay an individual who has an audience in which matches your demographic, or a demographic that stretches far and wide as to encapsulate as many people as possible. In the new age of media, it now extends not just to celebrities such as athletes or actors, but also to people or ‘influencers’ who have a large following on popular social media sites. Usually these paid promotions can be done quite seamlessly and prove to be quite successful for either the promoter or the thing being promoted. There have however been some funny cases in which a simple mistake has led to disastrous consequences.

Gal Gadot, the actress most famous for staring in the 2017 film Wonder Woman, was hired to becoming a celebrity endorser for Chinese phone giant Huawei. A part of this deal including that she would tweet out to her millions of followers how much she loves using her new Huawei phone. The only issue with this is that Twitter has a feature which allows you to see which operating system you have posted from, and her tweet was visibly posted from an Apple device, one of Huawei’s main competitors. Once it was discovered that all of her tweets had in fact been posted from an iPhone, her or her social media manager went through and deleted all evidence of their promotional betrayal.