Chevron’s Amazing Advertising Fail?
A few days ago there was a large thread on Hacker News about aerial footage of an un-contacted Amazon tribe in the Brazilian rainforest. It was particularly interesting to me as, living in Peru, this issue gets discussed quite a bit. After all, Peru’s president Alan Garcia has gone on the record stating that there is no proof such a tribe exists. Then this headline on the Huffington Post really caught my eye:
In Chevron RICO Suit Aagainst Amazonians, Who’s the Real Gangster?
Say what?! That let me to this New York Times article about the issue, where I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
My first thought was, wow epic fail!! I clicked through anyway, might as well make them pay for it. Here is the page I landed on:
Then I figured maybe they were trying to do some damage control, by pumping a ton of ad dollars to buy up the space around the story on the NYT. My last thought, before I closed the page was… yeah I agree, but a RICO suit? I won’t claim to know anything behind the story of either side. I simply found it a bit crazy to see those ads next to that headline. In my mind, that’s a lot of wasted money. But hey, maybe NYT found a sustainable business model after all… write negative stories about huge multi-national companies and then sell them advertising to try to get their side heard.
