Saturday, December 06, 2008

Corporate CYA for Pearl Harbor Day (2001 Edition)

I'm going through some old work files and swag while watching the Duke-Michigan basketball game (second half is starting right now, Michigan is up), and I found this memo, which dates back to 2001, which was the 60th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Since the date of the attack, of course, was December 7th, it's a pretty timely and serendipitous find:
Subj: EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: 60th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor
Date: 11/26/01 5:44:29 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: [redacted]
To: [redacted]
Sent on: AOL 5.0 for windows sub 138

Hi Everyone,

We have a very important issue regarding any promotion of the 60th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor, occuring Dec 7th. It is VERY important that ads and promos for Japanese auto partners like Toyota, Lexus, Nissan, and Honda, or any other Japanese product producing partners, do not appear anywhere in Pearl Harbor packages or News packages related to Pearl Harbor. Any Pearl Harbor packages should run house ads to shield these major, major advertisers from any unwanted rotations. As you can imagine, this is a very sensitive topic for those companies, and we want to make sure we cover our bases.

If you are planning to promote Pearl-Harbor related content on any of your screens and have questions, please let Edit Ops know. Your diligence and cooperation are greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
[redacted]

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

And don't forget ad exec Jerry Della Femina's 1970 book, tastefully named after his proposed US ad campaign for Panasonic: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front Line Dispatches from the Advertising Wars