In last night's Top Comments, I dropped a plug for the new anti-Koch brothers ad (natch). In response, lotac and Rosalie907 mentioned that they'd seen a pro-Koch ad on the telly recently, specifically, an ad for Koch Industries, talking about how great their products are and how wonderful it is to work for them.
This struck me as rather odd. Why would Koch Industries, whose companies sell such very different products and services, bother with a direct-to-public ad campaign for the parent company? Sure, there's a need for commercials with adorable angel babies to sell Angel Soft toilet paper and campaigns to promote GP sheetrock over other brands, but the core parent company, essentially a commodities broker and energy company, doesn't need commercials.
Curious, I poked into the Advertising Age site to see what was up with this odd campaign and found this is, indeed, Koch Industries first TV commercial. The feel-good, who-we-are/what-we-do spot, titled "Koch: From the Heart," began running June 11 in a national campaign, ostensibly for personnel recruitment.
The campaign, which promotes the company's American heritage and job creation without referencing the Koch brothers themselves, is part of a larger recruiting effort, said Steve Lombardo, chief communications and marketing officer for Koch since February. The company created his role as part of the overall push to boost its communications resources.
The ultimate goal is to "tell a story about who we are" to potential employees as well as businesses and people in local communities in which the company operates, he added.
Koch industries houses packaged-goods group Georgia Pacific, which owns consumer brands like Brawny and Dixie, as well as business-to-business operations. It was the second-largest private company in 2013 with $115 billion in revenue, according to Forbes, which also estimates the brothers' net worth at more than $40 billion each.
Oh, dear, I might have dropped a little bolding in there.
AdAge's reporter, Alexandra Bruell, has few illusions about the real purpose of the spot, which she lays out in her first graf:
Koch Industries, the energy and packaged-goods giant, has introduced its first national TV ad campaign amid increasing attacks on its namesake founders, the billionaire conservative brothers Charles and David Koch.
Bruell also notes that the ad is part of the coordinated campaign which included Brother Charles' "I'm trying to save America; why is everyone so mean to me?"
whinefest in the Wall Street Journal.
So, an energy/commodities-management company, privately-held with no hoardes of shareholders to appease, which has never felt the need to advertise itself before, is suddenly running a nationwide TV, print, social and free media campaign to snag a few good managers? In a chronically underemployed economy? Riiiiiiiight...
My guess is that the efforts of many here and elsewhere to educate our countrymen to the ideology, influence and reach of the Kochs' political operations are starting to bear fruit, particularly campaigns to identify and encourage boycotts of Koch-manufactured products. (BTW, there's an app for that).
Now is the time to redouble those efforts, and to reach out to our friends, family, co-workers, etc. with the information on the Kochs, who they are and what they're trying to do to this country, encourage more economic and public pushback against these sociopaths who literally want to dismantle our federal and state governments until they are nothing but "night watchmen" to protect their businesses.
Heck, I might just make an ad about it. Maybe call it, "It's Working."