The Carter-Ruck school of viral marketing

How to ensure maximum publicity for your new gagging order

Marketing experts were stunned today at the success of media law firm Carter-Ruck's high profile 'gagging order' campaign, designed to generate buzz around their client Trafigura's latest toxic waste product.

Brand awareness for the British oil company, described as 'absurdly evil' by insiders, rocketed after a cryptic viral 'seed' appeared in yesterday's The Guardian. The mysterious message simply read:

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

Within nanoseconds, bloggers, Twitterers and possibly even Bebo users were speculating on the exciting true identity of the shadowy litigator responsible for the gag. Less than a minute later, 187,000 Twitter users simultaneously discovered that oil giant Trafigura was the subject of a Parliamentary question and flooded the interwebs with 'Gotcha!' messages.

Public awareness of the brand name 'Trafigura' leaped by around 700%, up from 0.1% market penetration the day before. A spokesman said: 'This is a great result. Nobody had heard of us or our toxic waste dumping practices until Carter-Ruck got involved. This kind of publicity is priceless!'

An industry analyst said: 'It's been a clever job, making great use of viral and self-facilitating media nodes. Brands are starting to realise that to really make a splash you need to go the extra mile, do something big and zany - Carter-Ruck's strategy of assaulting British democracy and raping the very concept of free speech delivered an incredible awareness boost.

However, they couldn't have done it without the Guardian. I think this demonstrates the growing importance of tightly integrated cross-platform actionplanned thoughtleader bacterial germination multi-maven campaigns.'

The campaign ended at 13:08 today, but it is hoped that awareness of Trafigura's toxic waste products will endure. 'It was a shock-and-awe approach', said a man, 'but we're hoping that doesn't necessarily mean a short-tail. Hopefully people will still recognise the name Trafigura and remember Carter-Ruck in the run up to Christmas.'

See also: Chicken Yoghurt and The Graun: Probo Koala
And from Layscience: Trafigura: A Carter-Ruck Fuck-Up

Who needs truth when you have an agenda?

Unscrupulous lawyers have again forced Britain's third favourite newspaper to pay out tens of thousands of pounds in damages to amoral nogoodniks for alleged "false, defamatory and deeply offensive allegations" and hurt feelings.

The latest judgement against The Daily Mail was meted out after the 'victims' - three career women cynically earning more from their high-flying jobs than most men - claimed that an article published on November 5th last year was inaccurate in stating that they chose to adopt children instead of giving birth just to avoid jeopardising their careers and attractive, svelte figures.

The offending article, which has been removed from the Mail's online internet webpage, was headlined: 'For most women, giving birth is the most fulfilling event in their lives. But some are so afraid of missing out on their careers and losing their figures they refuse to go through pregnancy and choose adoption instead. Practical, or just plain selfish?'

The piece concluded that the made-up situation is, of course, 'just plain selfish' and that women who dare go to work after having children are latter-day Jezebels too arrogant to realise their proper place is in the home (specifically the kitchen, or the bedroom on Friday nights) Adoption, it said, presented a practical way for work obsessed females to continue earning while having a child around so they could chat with colleagues about private nurseries and size 1 designer shoes.

But despite invaluable coverage in a respected national newspaper, the women - Edwina Langley, Lisa Beard-Rogers and Thema Davis - were not satisfied with the article's contents.

Mrs Davis claimed that the Mail had neglected to add that she was in fact unable to conceive naturally and so adoption was the only available option, Mrs Beard-Rogers said that, contrary to the article's assertions, she was in fact considering a natural birth, and Mrs Langley claimed to have been misrepresented and, in fact, wished to adopt as she was not in a relationship and because she wanted to give a stable, loving home to an underprivileged child that might otherwise spend countless years in care.

A source said: 'Look, the details aren't important, it's the bigger issue that matters. And that issue is that women should have children the old fashioned way and stay at home. I don't know why people get so wound up with boring, pointless facts.'

After complaining to the Press Complaints Commission, the three women accepted a £30,000 payout from the Mail. The newspaper defended its honour by revealing that 'offending elements' of the piece had been added by 'an unnamed executive who controlled a rewrite of the story...rather than the journalists who interviewed the women', which makes it ok because it was bigger boys who did it not innocent Mail journalists who would never dream of making mean things up about women.

Paul Dacre said: 'Well, boys will be boys. I can't control every tiny little thing that gets written.'

The unsavoury incident follows a number of other high profile cases where women have claimed compensation for frivolous grievances that they brought upon themselves anyway: in February a blonde TV presenter sued the BBC after being fired two weeks after giving birth, and only a month before, a married Muslim woman took her employer to court for some light-hearted office banter and racist innuendo.

A local man said: 'Cuh. These women should know their limits.'