Botoxing history
It’s nice to see that one’s advice is occasionally taken up. A few years ago we wrote that perhaps AB-InBev should employ some bloggers to give Mr Brito’s malicious U.S. critics a good run for their vitriol on the internet. In early January 2012 UK media found out that AB-InBev had attempted to do just that.
Inquiries by the Labour Member of Parliament Tom Watson revealed that AB-InBev had been so keen to kill off the unflattering nickname “wife-beater”, which their Stella Artois brand had acquired in the UK in the early noughties, that the brewer hired a top lobbying company to smooth out Stella’s entry in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, by getting rid of the dreaded nick-name.
Portland Communications, which is run by Tony Blair’s former adviser Tim Allan, managed to improve the beer’s online reputation on behalf of its brewer, AB-InBev. This is ok by Wikipedia’s rules as it’s an open encyclopedia and anybody can alter or improve entries.
However, like botox, the effects of which wear off after a few weeks, the surgically enhanced Stella Artois entry did not last for long as the site’s watchful users spotted the editing and reversed it.
To their embarrassment, Wikipedia managed to trace the new edit back to Portland Communications. As we all know by now: whatever you do on the internet, you leave traces behind.
A spokesman for Portland did not deny they had made the changes, saying they had been done in an open manner and within Wikipedia’s rules.
This may be the case. But it does not reflect well on your worldly wisdom if you try to rewrite history while everybody in the UK over the age of thirty will have that particular nickname ingrained on their memory for eons. Sadly but true, it has already become part of the UK’s cultural DNA. Like that other immortal slogan, which Heineken coined in the 1970s: “Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach” which has spawned an endless stream of spoofs for its hmhmhm innuendo.
Our advice to AB-InBev: be a good sport and show some sense of humour.
