Tappening is run by a couple of guys who don’t like bottled water. The liquid is fine, but they worry about those small transparent bottles. First, the air gets polluted when they’re fabricated and then, after they’ve been emptied and tossed in the trash, the plastic doesn’t quickly break down and reenter the ecosystem.

The Tappening people also notice that bottled-water advertising can be deceitful. The labels and ad campaigns are known to feature mountain streams in forest paradises, breeding the idea that the water is pumped from pristine natural sources when the truth is a lot of it comes from the tap, usually with some filtering applied.

Faced with the distasteful situation—polluting water bottles and deceitful advertising—the Tappening crew could’ve put together some of their own ads revealing the true source of common bottled waters and the destiny of the containers, but they chose to mount a more aggressive campaign. One effort is a print ad with a crying polar bear drawn at the center, sitting on a melting arctic glacier. Under the title “Bottled Water,” the text says, “98% melted ice caps, 2% polar bear tears.” At the bottom, in small print, a message reads, “If bottled water companies can lie, we can too.”“New Tappening Ads Tell Lies—Honest,” Adweek, July 23, 2009, accessed June 2, 2011, http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/creative/news/e3i04ac5aa7296d367cc7c7c9623bc3df48.

Two curious news stories. The first comes from the BBC and tells of a shopaholic, a woman who purchased so much she could hardly fit it all in her apartment. When she passed away from pneumonia, it took more than a day to find her body underneath all the purchases. A friend commented, “It gave her pleasure to buy things, she only bought things she really liked.”“Shopaholic Died under Purchases,” BBC, July 28, 2009, accessed June 2, 2011, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester/8173271.stm.

The second story relates that in India, according to a UN report, there are about 560 million cell phone users, but only 360 million people have access to toilets.“India Has More Mobile Phones Than Toilets: UN report,” Telegraph, April 15, 2010, accessed June 2, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7593567/India-has-more-mobile-phones-than-toilets-UN-report.html.

Statistics aren’t available, but the amount of time guys spend spilling seduction lines—and the amount of time women spend dealing with them—is very high. Most women can deal with it coming from most guys, but what happens when the lines come from a powerful corporation?

The giant pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim has stumbled onto a drug (Flibanserin) that makes women want sex. That’s not going to earn them any money, though. To get sales, they’ve got to convince women that they want to want to have sex. The problem is interesting. The drug company has discovered the cure to a disease that, by definition, no one has. If a woman—or a man—doesn’t feel like having sex, then she doesn’t feel like she’s missing something by not doing it. The opposite is the case. She doesn’t want to do it, so the fact that she doesn’t feel like doing it isn’t a problem at all. It’s perfect, actually. What the company needs to do, therefore, is create a desire. It has to make women want (or even need) something they didn’t know they wanted.

According to the New York Times, “Boehringer has been trying to lay the consumer groundwork with a promotional campaign about women’s low libido, including a Web site, a Twitter feed and a publicity tour by Lisa Rinna, a soap opera star and former Playboy model who describes herself as someone who has suffered from a disorder that Boehringer refers to as a form of ‘female sexual dysfunction.’”Duff Wilson, “Push to Market Pill Stirs Debate on Sexual Desire,” New York Times, June 16, 2010, accessed June 2, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/business/17sexpill.html?src=me&ref=business.

That advertising campaign is geared to create a desire for a form of women’s Viagra by convincing women that they’re supposed to want sex, and there’s something wrong with them if they don’t. The effort has its critics. Here’s one argument: “Boehringer’s market campaign could create anxiety among women, making them think they have a condition that requires medical treatment. ‘This is really a classic case of disease branding,’ said Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, an associate professor at Georgetown University. ‘The messages are aimed at medicalizing normal conditions, and also preying on the insecurity of the patient.’”Duff Wilson, “Push to Market Pill Stirs Debate on Sexual Desire,” New York Times, June 16, 2010, accessed June 2, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/business/17sexpill.html?src=me&ref=business

In a world of get-rich-quick schemes, few are mentioned more frequently than lawsuits. One of the reasons is the infamous McDonald’s coffee case (Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants). This is what happened in 1992 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Stella Liebeck, seventy-nine, was riding in a car driven by her grandson. They stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through, where she purchased a Styrofoam cup of coffee. Wanting to add cream and sugar, she squeezed the cup between her knees and pulled off the plastic lid. The entire thing spilled back into her lap. The searing liquid left her with extensive third-degree burns. Eight days of hospitalization—which included skin grafts—were required.

Initially, she sought $20,000 from McDonald’s, which was more or less the cost of her medical bills. McDonald’s refused. They went to court. There it came to light that about seven hundred claims had been made by consumers between 1982 and 1992 for similar incidents. This seems to indicate that McDonald’s knew—or at least should have known—that the hot coffee was a problem.

Most of the rest of the case turned around temperature questions. McDonald’s admitted that they served their coffee at 185 degrees, which will burn the mouth and throat and is about 50 degrees higher than typical homemade coffee. More importantly, coffee served at temperatures up to 155 degrees won’t cause burns, but the danger rises abruptly with each degree above that limit. So why did McDonald’s serve it so hot? Most customers, the company claimed, bought on the way to work or home and would drink it on arrival. The high temperature would keep it fresh until then. Unfortunately, internal documents showed that McDonald’s knew their customers intended to drink the coffee in the car immediately after purchase. Next, McDonald’s asserted that their customers wanted their coffee hot. The restaurant conceded, however, that customers were unaware of the serious burn danger and that no adequate warning of the threat’s severity was provided.

Finally, the jury awarded Liebeck $160,000 in compensatory damages and $2.7 million in punitive damages (about two days worth of McDonalds’ coffee sales). The judge, however, reduced the $2.7 million to $480,000. McDonald’s threatened to appeal, and the two sides eventually came to a private settlement agreement.Consumer Attorneys of California, “The Actual Facts About the McDonalds’ Coffee Case,” The ‘Lectric Law Library, 1995, accessed June 2, 2011, http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm.

This is a condensed version of a dialogue between Vincent Ferrari and AOL, an Internet services provider known especially for its e-mail.

This went on for almost five minutes. Part of the audio can be heard here:

Cancel AOL

Back in the days before Internet, exchanges like this would’ve been entirely positive for AOL. The worst that could’ve happened is that the company would lose the client, who they were going to lose anyway. By dragging the cancellation out, they may have convinced him to stay on, so that’s what they did.

Today, with Internet, things are different. Ferrari (who, apparently, suspected that AOL would try some shenanigans) taped the conversation and posted it. The Slashdot effect—a website overwhelmed by a huge spike in traffic—followed immediately. It wasn’t long before Ferrari and his conversation were appearing on shows like Today. The damage to the AOL brand was catastrophic. Revenue plummeted, and with no hope for recovery, the company that owned and controlled AOL at the time, Time Warner, sold off the shriveled remains.

Certainly, the Ferrari tape didn’t alone bring down AOL, not even close, but it’s difficult for any company to be profitable when recordings like Ferrari’s are going out over national TV and available for anyone to hear, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, forever, online.