While Burger King is hanging out with Clive Owen, its rival burgermeister, McDonald's, is being egged by the likes of Ryan Gosling over its poultry practices.

The back story: When McDonald’s was informed that one of its egg suppliers was treating its chickens horrendously by shoving them into increasingly crowded spots to live upon the remains of now deceased chickens as well as cutting off their beaks so they couldn’t peck one another, the company immediately got out of the contract.

But protestors and activists want the fast-food giant to do a lot more than that. Celebrities including Ryan Gosling, Zooey Deschanel, Alicia Silverstone, and Steve-O (of Jackass fame) have signed a letter to McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner that asks Mickey D’s to release the birds from their impossibly small cages, according to ABC News.Continue reading...

When it was announced in August that Dow Chemical planned to spend $10.8 million to have its name emblazoned in a fabric wrap around London’s Olympic stadium for the Games next summer, there was an angry outcry, particularly by athletes and Olympic organizers in India.

After all, it was there that the Dow subsidiary Union Carbide leaked enough gas and chemicals to kill approximately 15,000 and leave many others sick back in 1984. There was even talk that the Indian Olympic team would boycott the Games, but that was rejected on Saturday.

Dow didn’t own Union then, but Indian residents are feeling the fallout and Dow’s name doesn’t exactly inspire the Olympic spirit in many Indian residents. Now TheHindu.com reports that Dow has “agreed to remove all its branding from the London Olympic stadium.”Continue reading...

Everybody loves Michael Jordan, right? The ultimate brand spokesman, who won six NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls, has been affiliated with a slew of brands in his 48 years: Nike (which produces his lucrative Jordan Brand line), Coca-Cola, Gatorade, MCI, McDonald’s, Chevrolet, Wheaties, Rayovac, Ball Park Franks, and Hanes.

Since March of 2010, he’s been the majority owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Bobcats, the first former player to hold such a title. Since he’s seen both sides of the coin, you’d think that when the NBA lockout occurred, Jordan would have been able to help broker a deal between the players and his fellow owners.

Instead, Jordan went hard-line against the players, not wanting to give in an inch, and reportedly getting fined by the NBA for his public comments. Now that the lockout's end is looming, one wonders how much his sudden tough-guy appearance hurt his brand.Continue reading...

Change is coming to your Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo, but it’s going to take two years for it to happen. In fact, your baby may have grown right out of using these products by then. Following the recent dust-up, the company will remove a chemical from its baby shampoos that is potentially carcinogenic, but it will take two years for the shift to totally take place, according to the Chicago Tribune.

The change isn’t just to shampoos, actually. The formaldehyde-releasing preservative, Quaternium-15, will be taken out of hundreds of J&J products, the paper notes. The nonprofit Campaign for Safe Cosmetics first raised its concerns with J&J about the chemical back in 2009 and the company began phasing its use out then. But it is still pervasive and the company promised to have it gone from its products in two years. 

CEO William Weldon told the group in a letter that “the company is making the effort even though the trace amounts of formaldehyde exposure pose little risk,” the paper notes, writing that a full bottle of shampoo has the same amount of formaldehyde as what a person would endure "by eating an apple or pear, in which it occurs naturally."

Like the act of Tebowing before her, Los Angeles gallery owner Kristen Christian managed to create a sensation extremely quickly by using social media.

Christian is the founder of Bank Transfer Day, which took place on Saturday, Nov. 5. The idea, for those of you who’ve been under a rock recently, was for people who are fed up with the actions of big banks (read: Occupy Movement activists and almost everyone else)  to take every last penny out of those banks and stick it into a small community bank or credit union where actual face-to-face service might be a reality.

Nearly 80,000 people had signed up via the movement's Facebook page and Twitter feed as of Friday to say they’d be making the switch, according to the Village Voice. The Christian Science Monitor estimated that before the day even hit, almost 850,000 people had already made the switch; ABC News estimated about 1 million customers were making the switch.Continue reading...

"No pants day; batting, owling and planking; people thinking they are vampires and zombies; the world's gone crazy ... No! The world's gone Four Loko!"

So begins the press release for Phusion Products' new Four Loko beverage campaign, the brand's latest in an ongoing effort to clean up its image by mocking its image in the media.

In a true bit of irony, the brand is now doing almost exactly what it told us a year ago it "made a conscious effort to reject."Continue reading...

From the "You can't you make this stuff up" Dept. — a Swiss political party has named itself the Anti-PowerPoint Party and is launching a campaign to bring an end to Microsoft's presentation software. In other news, yes — those are cheers from marketers you hear.

The APP claims PowerPoint costs the Swiss economy €1.7 billion annually, thus its stated goal: "In the future, those in companies, congresses, universities, schools, who want to renounce PowerPoint*, should not have to justify themselves any longer. We do not want to abolish PowerPoint*; we only want to abolish the PowerPoint*-CONSTRAINT."

As arguments go, that one has more holes than, well, Swiss cheese.Continue reading...

College students of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s rocked the nation with anti-authoritarian protests against the Vietnam war, nuclear war, racism, sexism, Watergate, and plenty of other things.

Today, college students in Chicago are getting upset about … hummus. Sabra hummus, to be precise.

According to the DePaul University group Students for Justice in Palestine, Sabra’s majority owners, the Strauss Group, “sends financial support to two Israeli military units accused of human rights abuses,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported. PepsiCo, by the way, owns the other 49%.

So the group’s members went to the student government offices and got them to agree to put the Sabra issue on a ballot. The vote was taken and 1,127 were in favor of getting rid of Sabra hummus in the cafeteria while 332 wanted to keep the chickpea dip around.Continue reading...