Cover Ups in Advertising

---Coors
The Coors Brewing Company was launching its “Pure Water 2000 Campaign” in the late 1980’s, “because it was the right thing to do.” The company’s 1990 annual report stated, “Pete Coors (great grandson of company founder Adolph Coors) personally kicked off the Coors pure Water 2000 program, a national commitment to help clean up America’s rivers, streamside, extolling in the virtues of clean water.”

The Denver Post reported that Coors “officially became a toxic criminal on October 12, 1990, when they pleaded guilty to violating state environmental law by illegally pumping industrial solvents into Clear Creek from 1976 to 1989.”

And when a massive Coors beer spill wiped out all of the fish in a 5.2-mile stretch of the creek in 1991, company head Bill Coors told the shareholders it was no big deal-the fish were only “junk fish,” and Clear Creek “was not a prime fishing stream.”

---Visa

140 different retailers, including cruise lines, expensive stores, chic gift boutiques, and resort destinations “don’t take American Express,” so bring your Visa card.

“Some of the featured partners, Carnival Cruise Lines among them, took American Express until just before they appeared in Visa’s commercials,” The Wall Street Journal reported in 1999. “And, after reaping the national publicity at Visa’s expense, quietly resumed taking American Express. Others didn’t even go that far, “We never really stopped taking Amex fully, says Les Otten, Chairmen of American Skiing Company.”


Excerpts taken from Uncle John’s 13th Edition All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader, pp. 331