dirty-business

Coach Brand Teaches Students How To Be Dirty Shills

Hamilton Nolan · 05/05/08 03:12PM

Hunter College, the luxury brand Coach, fraudulent PR campaigns, and dishonest corporate collaboration with academia are the topics of the day today. Important topics! Adweek has just come out with a long investigative piece on a Coach-sponsored PR class at Hunter, which reeks of impropriety and dishonesty, and ended up tangling a bunch of college kids up in a fake online PR blog that makes them all look like a bunch of shady, dishonest undercover marketing hacks. "I knew a lot of hell would break loose about the class. And it did," said the teacher. Indeed. The condensed version of the whole sordid tale, after the jump.

Mark Penn: You Fool

Hamilton Nolan · 04/07/08 01:41PM

So Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's doughy chief strategist, finally got booted from the campaign last weekend. The majority of her campaign team hated him for some time, so his departure will be welcomed by insiders. They felt that his strategy was unsuccessful, and they were right. But the specific reason for Penn's departure was his idiot move of meeting with the Colombian government, in his day job as CEO of massive PR firm Burson-Marsteller, to represent them on the opposite side of an issue from Hillary Clinton, while running her campaign. And you know what? This moment was inevitable. The very idea of having a man simultaneously running a presidential campaign and an international PR firm is stupid, and never should have happened in the first place. You fools!