It hasn’t been a great couple of years for Johnson & Johnson. Since 2009, “faulty manufacturing” caused J&J to “recall millions of bottles and packages of Tylenol, Benadryl, Motrin and other over-the-counter medicines,” NBC News reports. While that was happening, pharmacies were starting to push their own private labels.

It got so bad that this past winter, CVS didn’t even stock Tylenol at a number of its stores. That isn't all. The company is facing over 10,000 lawsuits regarding the alleged failure of its Depuy metal-on-metal hip transplants, and it just got done paying $181 million in settlements over off-label marketing of its antipsychotic drug, Risperdal, Ad Age notes.

As Mad Men’s Don Draper says, if you don’t like what people are saying, you change the conversation. So J&J is going all-in on a rebrand, putting up to $30 million into a play-to-the-heartstrings Band-Aid of a campaign called “For All You Love.”Continue reading...

MasterCard is transforming its corporate culture from B2B to a technology firm as it puts its finger on the pulse of social interactions to better understand consumers and clients.

A year ago, Master Card contracted NY media agency Prime Research to develop the Conversation Suite, a real-time, global insight, web analytics tool and engagement engine that shifted the company from merely monitoring media to purposeful listening. "Over the past six months, 125,000 people created unique content or commentary about MasterCard, stimulating 520,000 social media conversations, with a potential reach of 1.3 billion people. We're doing this everyday across 43 markets and 26 languages in real time,” said Marcy Cohen, VP and Senior Business Leader at MasterCard.

brandchannel spoke with Cohen, who played a large role in the implementation of the conversation suite. “In the early days of social media, listening was the practice but now, there are so many opportunities to engage, to track trends and offer insights and deliver them back with analytics to customers," she said. “It’s a real-time focus group. We track all mentions of MasterCard and any of our products, plus the competition, which really means the entire payments industry. The Suites have a dedicated worldwide communications staff of 60 people, all with password protected access, in a comfortable setting with a giant 40 ft. LED screen that updates every four minutes.”Continue reading...

Adobe abandons boxed software for the cloud.

Samsung keeps hammering Apple in new ad strategy for Galaxy S4.

Tim Tebow tops Forbes' new list of most influential athletes.

Acer plans to launch windows tablet in June.

Aereo asks judge to prevent new lawsuits by CBS.

Audi considers building plant in Brazil but seeks clarity from government.

Disney plans new Star Wars games through Electronic Arts.

Estee Lauder sets sights on big September fragrance launch.

Facebook made the Fortune 500 list for the first time.Continue reading...

JCPenney's Magical Makeup Tour continues. Right after it posted a video mea culpa and launched a new Facebook and Twitter campaign to reach out to disaffected consumers, #jcpListens, the brand has made another major flip-flop in the interests of appeasing its traditional customer base. It's one of the handful of interesting attempts at brand forgiveness going on these days, which also include Mtn Dew, General Motors and Hyundai.

The retailer has reversed field and now plans to restore the house brand St. John's Bay, a $1 billion marque that was eliminated by since-ousted CEO Ron Johnson amid the many other mistakes he made in attempting to transform the venerable retailer. JCPenney announced that St. John's Bay emerged as tops in its poll on Facebook asking what JCPenney brand was the voter's favorite.

"We heard you," JCPenney said after the poll results were in. "St. John's Bay is back! What will you snag first, pants or shirts?" the brand posted on Facebook.Continue reading...

Gucci and Guess have been tussling over trademarks for years, but the Italian fashion house took a hit from its American counterpart on its own turf last week.

The Court of Milan turned out an 83-page ruling that “rejected all claims” that Gucci had filed against Guess, according to a press release. Not only that, “the Italian Court has ordered the cancellation of certain of Gucci’s diamond pattern, G logo, and ‘Flora’ pattern trademarks” along with its “rights in a ‘Square G’ logo.” 

This is a big blow to Gucci, which had received “minimal monetary damages and narrow injunctions on a handful of logos” in a similar case against Guess in New York that was decided last year. That “minimal” amount added up to $4.66 million, though Gucci had hoped to make a $120 million payday. This time, Guess scored a victory that allows it to use its famed Quattro G logo pattern without worry of infringing on any trademarks.Continue reading...

Continuing its aggressive push to convince the world that YouTube video content is better than TV, the online video giant is rumored to be launching paid subscriptions for specialist video channels as soon as this week, the Financial Times reports.

YouTube has said it was “looking into creating a subscription platform that could bring even more great content to YouTube for our users to enjoy and provide our creators with another vehicle to generate revenue from their content, beyond the rental and ad-supported models we offer.” 

The preeminent global video site has long-since evolved from its user-generated roots into a platform that every major company and marketer is looking to leverage with professional-grade content. With an audience of one billion, YouTube and its content partners are looking to create another revenue stream besides the site's burgeoning ad platform. "This is a whole new form of content, content delivery and content consumption," said DreamWorks CEO Jeffery Katzenberg in Business Insider. "It's the medium of the future and the future has already arrived. Video is becoming the global shared experience."Continue reading...

It's just another day in the rehabilitation efforts of Detroit. The city has launched its first business-to-business image campaign in five years, and Al Jazeera America has revealed that it'll place one of its dozen US news bureaus in Detroit, which has one of America's largest populations of people of Arab descent.

The last several months have continued to be rough on the image of the Motor City despite the fact that the Detroit Three automakers have been coming back smartly, manufacturing in metro Detroit is re-expanding, the Red Wings qualified for this month's playoffs for an NHL-record 22 years, Motown: The Musical has debuted on Broadway, and there's a genuine and substantial influx of workers and denizens back in the battered downtown of Detroit.

Still, the city has struggled to find its footing as Michigan instated an emergency financial manager on a resistant Detroit city government, and residents and tourists alike have struggled to "Say Nice Things About Detroit."Continue reading...

Before NBC’s The Office hit the airwaves nine seasons ago, the folks of Scranton, Penn., were a little weary about a sitcom calling the coal-mining town home. After all, as the Scranton Times Tribune points out, the city had been the butt of jokes on All in the Family, Friends, and The Sopranos. The Championship Season, the 1973 Pulitzer winner for Drama about a high school championship team in Scranton that gets together 20 years later, doesn’t exactly leave theatergoers feeling like they want to rush off to visit the place.

Now, the series that focuses on the employees of the Dunder Mifflin paper company is coming to a close and Scrantonites seem to be pleased with how the series gave “a steady supply of residual pop culture cachet.” That cachet won’t come to an end when the series airs its final episode on May 16. It’ll fade with time, but Office love is probably at its peak in Scranton right about now, especially after the show’s cast members, writers and creative team paid a visit this past weekend as part of a big “Wrap Party,” Entertainment Weekly reports.

Along with them came about 10,000 fans who wanted to celebrate the legacy of the sitcom. The stars of the show were paraded through town, signed autographs with fans, sang old tunes to the adoring masses and sat through an extended Q&A.Continue reading...