Ah, December. My favourite time of year. Not because of Christmas, roaring fires or panto season. Oh no. I’m rubbing my hands with glee over the Bad Company Awards.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this celebration of skulduggery, here’s a potted history. Now in its second year, Consumer International’s Bad Company Awards name and shame all the big corporations who have been particularly dastardly and misanthropic in 2008.

The big winner this year was Tesco. They picked up the Sledgehammer Award for silencing criticism. This is mainly down to the multinational retailer’s habit of suing the eye-teeth out of anyone who dares question its policies.

The religious among you may like to spare a prayer for Mr Jit, the Thai businessman who criticised the leviathan’s expansion into his country earlier this year and currently faces a $28.6m lawsuit and 2.5 years behind bars.

Kellogg’s and Lego jointly won the Blindingly Obvious Danger Awards for their Lego Brick candy. Their Fun Snacks look eerily like real Lego bricks. Two words: choking hazard. Unsurprisingly these Fun Bricks are relatively thin on the ground now. Too many close calls with toddlers, methinks.

The Marketing Overdose gong was picked up by Eli Lilly for its extravagant promotion of the erectile dysfuction drug, Cialis. These guys made $1.1bn from the wonder pills in 2007.

Not because it really is a cure-all for Mr Floppy – fewer than half men on ED drugs find them beneficial (not to mention the side effects) –  but because Lilly spent a whopping $152m on marketing in the US alone.

Other winners include Samsung’s Nice Little Sideline Award for selling tanks and artillery equipment and Toyota’s Green-scrubbing Award for consistently using misleading slogans and inflated green credentials.

Such unabashed bitchiness beats all the mulled wine and jingle bells in the world. And it’s wonderful being snide about people and companies that actually deserve it. So wonderful that I might just have to launch my own version of these awards - for small businesses and entrepreneurs, of course.

First up, Stelios would nab the Public Paddy Award for Sour Grapes. All this whinging in the press about how he’s not signing off easyJet’s accounts is just silly. Not to mention the threat to establish himself as chairman just to annoy everyone.

And the Bad Shag Entrepreneur Award definitely goes to Damien McKinney, founder of McKinney Rogers, for schtupping that man-eating bird Katie Hopkins off The Apprentice. Don’t it make you shudder?

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By Carmen Snipes  on   Dec 01,2008

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Keywords

company    PR    marketing    green    Lego    supermarkets   

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