Category Essential Law for Marketers

May 21, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle, Legal update  No comments

In 2006, Colette Pelissier was selling houses in Southern California, and her boyfriend, Brigham Field, was working as a photographer of nude models.

Colette Pelissier wanted to leave the real-estate business, so she convinced her boyfriend to start making adult films. “I had this idea, when the real-estate market was cooling—you know, maybe we could make beautiful erotic movies,” she said.

By 2009 they had launched X-art.com and had started shooting adult films in places like Madrid and Prague as Malibu Media. The website promised its customers erotica featuring “gorgeous fashion models from the USA, Europe, South America and Beyond...

May 20, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle, Legal update, News, Sponsorship News  No comments

May 13, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, News  No comments

Google and other search engine providers like AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft Internet Explorer have been dealt a major blow after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that Google must delete links to personal information about individuals from search results on request.

The ECJ ruling is likely to open the floodgates to a wave of similar requests from users wanting to remove potentially embarrassing or harmful information about them from Google search results after it enshrined the “right of erasure” (previously known as the ‘right to be forgotten’) in European law.

The ruling doesn’t mean that information will be removed from the internet but removing it from search result...

May 3, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle, Legal update  One comment

Every organisation needs to address data protection, confidentiality, data security, data breaches and freedom of information as part of their compliance and risk management policies and procedures. UK-based companies face a major shake-up in how they conduct consumer sales and marketing activities over the next 12-months in the wake of a raft of new laws and regulations emanating from the UK and the European Union (EU).

With a close focus being taken by UK and European legislators on the individual’s right to privacy, marketers face one of the toughest marketing regulatory regimes in the world.

Keeping up-to-date with a torrent of guidance from the Information Commissione...

March 28, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle, Marketing practice, Public Relations practice  No comments

Product placement has been around as long as TV itself. One of the earliest examples of product placement was in 1949 when NBC launched America’s first daily TV news programme, the ‘Camel News Caravan’, featuring a newsreader smoking a Camel cigarette and a policy that banned footage of ‘no smoking’ signs and anyone puffing on a cigars, including Sir Winston Churchill!

Today, brand and product tie-ins are less brazen but equally effective as a weapon for achieving a brand positioning advantage over the competitors’ above-the-line PR and marketing efforts.

The James Bond film franchise is credited with having started the current fashion of placing well-known brand...

March 17, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle  No comments

March 7, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle, Legal update, Thought Leadership  No comments

UK-based companies face a major shake-up in how they conduct consumer sales and marketing activities over the next 12-months in the wake of a raft of new laws and regulations emanating from the UK and European Union (EU).

With a closer focus being taken by UK and European legislators on the individual’s right to privacy, marketers face one of the toughest marketing regulatory regimes in the world.

So keeping up-to-date with a torrent of guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office and ever more prescriptive drafts of the forthcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation is now essential in order to stay one step ahead of the competition.

We are kicking off our firs...

February 26, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle, Legal update, Marketing practice, Public Relations practice, Sales practice  No comments

Sales and marketing practices of online retailers selling similar products and services of well-known brands will need to change after the High Court ruled that online giant Amazon can’t use a Google Ad Word of soap and beauty brand Lush to lure customers to its own retail site for alternative products as this amounts to a breach of the Lush trademark.

Lush has built a brand platform based on its own code of ethics – something which it jealously defends and contends that Amazon doesn’t subscribe to.

As a result, Lush decided it won’t sell its products on the retail giant’s website and probably never will...

February 21, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Events, Guru in a Bottle, Legal update, Marketing practice, News, Sponsorship News  No comments

So the question on most marketers’ lips at the half-way stage of the Sochi Winter Olympic Games 2014 is who’s winning brand gold and who’s coming last in the multi-million dollar sponsorship stakes?

Well, this picture sums up the problem, doesn’t it?

An Olympic Official at Sochi with duct tape sticking it over the Apple logo of the laptop belonging to Associated Press director of international video Mark Davies. As if this pretty innocuous indirect view of an Apple logo on this laptop justifies this type of treatment?

Well, it’s bonkers really but then you need to understand the reasoning behind this extreme form Olympic brand protection.

Non-Olympic partners such as ...

February 12, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, News, Social marketing practice  No comments

Entrepreneur, lawyer and international deal-maker Clive Rich spotted a gap in the market for delivering high quality legal services to small-medium sized companies at the fraction of the fees that would normally be charged by a high street law firm.

The difference was that this legal advice would be delivered online and LawBite the brand was born.

But rather than go to a private equity provider or a bank in order to bankroll the new venture, Rich decided to use crowd sourcing to finance the enterprise.

In fact, seeking investment from the same small-medium sized companies that would want to use these legal services in the first place was a stroke of genius.

This deceptively s...