Janice,
4/1/96: Taco Bell Buys the Liberty Bell; Distributes PR over PRNewswire
New report of the incident:
Taco Bell pulls April Fool's prank with the Liberty Bell
ASSOCIATED PRESS
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- A cursory check of the Liberty Bell on Monday found no trace of taco juice on the iron, no Burrito Supremes in the
crack.
No, Taco Bell didn't buy the Liberty Bell.
In an April Fools' Day joke, the fast-food chain took out full-page ads in eight newspapers announcing that it had purchased America's symbol of freedom to help shrink the federal debt.
The bell will henceforth be called, the ads said, the Taco Liberty Bell.
By noon -- the traditional time for confessions -- the company came clean. The bell will remain in its home outside Independence Hall, and the Irvine, Calif., company will donate $50,000 toward preservation and maintenance.
"We would never say we didn't need the money," said Martha B. Aikens, superintendent of Independence National Historical Park. "But the
word sale never came up."
Taco Bell refused to say how much it paid for the ads.
Legally, the federal government couldn't sell the Liberty Bell even if wanted to. The city of Philadelphia actually owns the bell (which a Taco Bell press release points out weighs the same -- 2,080 pounds -- as 11,093 tacos and would need 5,376 packets of hot sauce to fill it up).
"We're not about to run for the border," said Kevin Feeley, a City Hall spokesman. His boss, Mayor Edward G. Rendell, said hoax or not, he would hit up the company for a new Liberty Bell pavilion.
The joke provided several hours of amusement -- and amazement -- before the truth came out.
"Get out of here!" said Arthur Davis, 37, as he visited the bell. "You can't just buy that."
Janet Friedman, a teacher from Ann Arbor, Mich., was angry about the "commercialization" of the bell. But she admitted the ad was a perfect
tool for her middle-school class, which studied propaganda last week.
"I'm having enough trouble teaching my kids American history," Friedman said. "I think my sixth-graders will eat it up."
So did the White House.
"We will be doing a series of these things," press secretary Mike McCurry said. "Ford Motor Company is joining today in an effort to refurbish the Lincoln Memorial. It will be the Lincoln Mercury Memorial."
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This article was published on Tuesday, April 2, 1996
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Copyright 1996, Student Publications Inc. All rights reserved. This document may be distributed electronically, provided it is distributed in its entirety and includes this notice. However, it cannot be reprinted without the express written permission of Student Publications Inc., Kansas State University.
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spub.ksu.edu
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Ad agency who masterminded the plan gets tons of awards and Taco Bell sales zoom!
Paine & Associates picked up a lot of awards last year - regional and national - for a project it managed on behalf of longtime client Taco Bell. The agency masterminded the announcement (on April Fools Day) that Taco Bell had signed a deal to become the name sponsor of the Liberty Bell. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that not everyone accepted the announcement with good humor, it garnered fantastic national publicity and drove sales. It also provides a perfect example of the kind of risky creative work that comes out of David Paine and Jim Delulio's shop - one of the best small agencies on the West Coast.
prcentral.com
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Commentary from someone who was taken in for a while:
Little Green Men on the Web
By Teresa A. Martin
I've long been the ideal target for April Fool's jokes, always willing to believe a story however far-fetched as long as it was presented in a serious tone. OK, OK, go ahead and laugh but did you believe the Challenger crashed the first time you heard the news? I thought it was a sick joke -- after all, NASA wasn't crashing things anymore. Doesn't this Mad Cow disease sound too strange to be true? And that odd family
situation your aunt told you about? Every family has one of those skeletons that you aren't quite sure whether to believe in because it sounds just too out-of-bounds.
Maybe I'm a little too credulous ... or maybe I've just seen enough odd events to make me a firm believer in the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction school. And so for about 45 seconds I wasn't sure if Taco Bell had really purchased the Liberty Bell or not.
(If you missed it, Taco Bell launched it's new ad campaign on April Fool's day with a faux press release and a full page bogus ad in several major print newspapers. The release and ad said, very seriously, that Taco Bell had purchased the US Liberty Bell and planned to change the bell's name to the Taco Liberty Bell.)
OK, OK go ahead and laugh. Taco Bell/Liberty Bell/April 1. It's obvious, right? Except that it had all the hallmarks of "realism." I read the press release. It arrived in my e-mailbox through an online press release channel that sends real releases every day.
Same structure. Same language. Same channel.
The release even included real facts, too. Like the US government's shutdown closing the Liberty Bell to the public. Talk about April Fool's -- the US government shutting its doors. But that one really happened.
So I'm thinking "wow" and "huh?" and then about the time I got to the line in the press release that said the Liberty bell would replace the other bell in Taco Bell's logo, I realized it was April Fool's day. And I started laughing.
And that would have been the end of the Taco Liberty Bell in my mind except that the next day I got another press release. Same source. Same delivery channel. Dateline Houston. This release was headlined: Web Assurance Bureau. It pointed to a rather breathless-sounding web site that warned people of the dangers of being "ripped off." The release sounded sort-of legit. But then, so had the Taco Bell release. And at least I'd heard of Taco Bell.
I don't know otherwise, so I'm assuming these Web Assurance people are above-board. In any case, they started me thinking about the very real issue of accountability and trustability on the web.
There are many types of trust and accountability. Business trust is one sort. It's the one that makes you ask: Is this company going to send me the cure for disappearing hair or is it a front for collecting checks and doing its own disappearing act? It's also an area that various government and watchdog agencies will jump on fairly quickly.
In fact, last week Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger filed an injunction against a woman in Brockton MA whose WWW ad
claimed a "quick cure for HIV infection." He's quoted as saying that the case should "serve as a stern warning to other cyber snakeoil
salesmen." Bravo, Scott. As in the real world, all commerce needs a dollop of Buyer Beware. The snakeoil salesman has long adapted to every new medium to come along; the web's not any different.
Yet there's another sort of trust. Losing this one frightens me far more than seeing a few hundred people shell out cash for $29.95 Florida vacations.
This other trust focuses on information, the stuff we use to make judgements and build our view of the world. Can you believe what you read on the web? How do you know it's accurate? How does the agenda of the presenter slant the story? The sad fact is that the only rule we have for sorting truth from not-truth is trust. We trust the source of the story. We know it's accountable for what it says and has standards of accuracy. But what's the source on the web? And was the story really generated by the source?
I don't mean to suggest there are evil hordes ready to assault our notions of truth and recreate reality. For the most part, it's much more subtle than that. On the web, everyone is right. Lots of people believed the poodle-in-the-microwave story and innocently passed it along. Ditto for the gang scare stories that circulated online a year or so ago. And the request for postcards for the dying boy. The oil slick of rumor, innuendo, and general misinformation spreads at an incredible pace online.
Other medium have their weak spots, but we grew up with both print and broadcast paradigms. They've been part of our lives and have sunk
into our subconsciousness to the point we've developed a sort of crude bullshit meter. If The New York Times says the little green men are
asking to see our leaders, well... maybe. But it the Weekly World News shows the little alien waving to its fans, we laugh and wink. If you see it on Hard Copy, you generally take it with a grain of salt. On Oprah, well, you interpret it through the Oprah lens as you learn that little green men sleep with their best friends' girlfriends too.
And yet we can be fooled. Pickup trucks, it turns out, don't explode quite as easily as one network would have you believe. And Hitler's diaries weren't real. But it seems Britain's tabs were right about Charles and Di after all.
We have just the rudiments of that bullshit meter for the web. Younger generations who grow up with the web will have stronger ones, but right now our meters are pretty fragile. Remember www.dole96.org? It sounded real, people heard it and thought it was a site for Bob Dole's
presidential campaign. It DID have the right type of URL. It had a picture of Bob Dole. Hey, wasn't it natural to wonder if Bob Dole was
connected the family that started Dole pineapple-and-other-fruits? But wasn't that "presidential seal" a little, uhm, odd? And after a few minutes of reading, the tone wasn't quite ... on. Yup, it was a parody. The real Dole site is www.dole96.com. Or is it? Read the "why I support Bob Dole" statements and ask yourself: is this a parody or is this real?
So the question remains: if the site sounds real on the surface, how do you know it has legitimate information? When you read a note in a
newsgroup, what sort of weight do you give it? Information about your favorite star on the unofficial home page ... it's fun, but is it accurate? This line of thought raises lots of questions -- and produces no good answers. Except to remember that everything you see on the web isn't true.
There's a notion called "media literacy" and it first grew in popularity around the same time that Whittle's Channel One was sold into schools. The idea was that people are bombarded by information, but the best response isn't to legislate the media. Rather, it is to teach people to be educated consumers of information. Although originally applied to TV, the approach works equally well with the web. When you see something, don't just consume it blindly. Question it. Question its motives. And understand the nature of the medium -- the web -- that delivered it. Oh, and don't believe anything on April 1.
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Teresa A. Martin is one of the founders of Project Cool, Inc. Rumor has it that she refused to touch a keyboard on April first.
projectcool.com
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Someone reminisces about the PR:
From another producer come memories of the Liberty Bell incident. "...They sent video of the Liberty Bell with an abstract explaining that the Liberty Bell was being bought by Taco Bell. Of course, the date was April 1 [several years ago]-- they had just retyped a Taco Bell press release with no verification. Their later urgent note that the story 'might not be true' sent me into gales of laughter."
scripps.ohiou.edu
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Note: PRNewswire initiated a no April Fools joke policy after this. No lawsuits were filed.
KJC |
