Bluewater affair
The Bluewater affair was an elaborate guerrilla marketing campaign by directors Jan Henrik Stahlberg and Marcus Mittermeier for their film Short Cut to Hollywood . The focus was on a fictitious bomb attack in the fictional small town of Bluewater in California on September 10, 2009. The news of the attack was reported by the press agency dpa and various websites, but a short time later it was recognized as a false report and withdrawn. This was followed by a broad public discussion about correct journalistic work and the moral limits of advertising.
procedure
With the help of bogus witness calls to German editorial offices , Stahlberg and Mittermeier, together with an extensive team that also included several actors and a taz journalist, spread the news that three assassins had set off several bombs in a restaurant in the small American town of Bluewater. In order to make the news credible, the initiators previously set up fake websites for the city and the local television station KVPK-TV. They also used scenic material from their movie for this purpose. They also used social networks and falsified entries in the English language Wikipedia the day before .
The first thing the German press agency reported at 9:38 a.m. was to report exclusively in faith. In a short time it was taken over by other editorial offices and distributed. Shortly after the first report, the initiators published a correction that was also falsified: It was not about assassins, but German rappers who stormed into a restaurant with dummy bombs in order to attract media attention. This message was also disseminated by the dpa at 10:06 a.m. About four hours after the first breaking news, the dpa brought a revocation by notifying its customers that a fake had been caught.
The star , who had published the story on its website, confirmed Stahlberg a "great staging". In a statement, Stahlberg said that his project was critical of the fact that news coverage was ultimately only about quotas. Trailers and a making-of of the campaign were later shown on the fake websites . Two weeks after the Bluewater affair celebrated Short Cut to Hollywood premiere.
In the NDR media magazine zapp, the journalists' association netzwerk recherche certified that journalists had violated basic journalistic rules. As a lesson from the PR coup, the dpa changed its provisions for checking reports and their sources.
Media coverage
The star took up the Bluewater affair in its reporting when it reported on the fake Twitter messages in the election of the Federal President on June 30, 2010. The Bluewater affair is also taken into account in a report in the taz on June 22, 2010 about problems with news agencies.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento from July 31, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Guerrilla Marketing: Prohibited Good Advertising. In: Spiegel Online from January 10, 2010
- ^ Version change of the article "Bluewater, California" on the English language Wikipedia on September 9, 2009
- ↑ Media embarrassment: The Bluewater Affair. In: Stern from September 10, 2009.
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Ethics and Journalism: Promotional Video - The Deception of the Media. ( Memento of the original from July 31, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In zapp from September 16, 2009.
- ↑ Stefan Niggemeier : dpa: Lessons from Bluewater. in picture blog from September 15, 2009.
- ↑ Crisis of the news agencies: Before the final editorial deadline. In: The daily newspaper of June 22, 2010.
- ↑ The Federal Presidential Election and Twitter: The False Fortune Tellers from June 30, 2010
- ↑ Crisis of the news agencies: Before the final editorial deadline.
