Sorry, say Langham & Ramsay. Monday, 15th June 2009 Source : The Transit Cafe

Humble pie's the meal of the week for Langham Hotels and Gordon Ramsay - There’s been a bit of eating humble pie of late.

First, there’s Langham Hotels that had to call off its “Big Deal” viral video marketing campaign for Langham Place last month when it backfired bigtime.

Three videos which were supposed to show Langham Place as a sanctuary amid the chaos of Mongkok had bloggers up in arms, calling them “despicable”, “racist” and “disparaging”, with The Dark Side - Avoid dirty locals: stay at a Langham Hotel - leading the charge.

One video showed a Caucasian man walking out on the streets and being hassled by locals selling watches. Another showed a woman who wanted to have a meal sitting at a “daipaidong”. She wanted chicken but the man could not speak English and so ended up doing the chicken dance. She ended up with porridge with a chicken foot in it.

The agency, Prosperity Research, said they were meant to be satirical but we guess one man’s satire is another man’s insult.

While the videos have been pulled, they can still be watched at several websites, including on The Dark Side¹ and Living in Hong Kong².

Langham Hotels, responding to the blog in Living in Hong Kong, said , “Thank you for all the feedback weve received about our social network marketing campaign. It has clearly not achieved what we set out to do in terms of creating positive discussion. Unfortunately, we”ve upset a number of people along the way and we’re really sorry for that.

“We’ve learned a valuable lesson on social marketing. We promise to be more sensitive and hopefully you’ll find our future campaigns worthy of your attention.”

Ouch.

The other person who’s had to eat humble pie is foul-mouthed celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay who offered an unreserved apology to an Australian presenter whom he suggested was an ugly pig.

Ramsay apologized to Ms Tracy Grimshaw, the presenter of A Current Affair, after his mother called him to tell him she was disgusted with his behaviour, according to an AFP report.

He showed a picture of a woman apparently naked on all fours with the face of a pig and said “that’s Tracy Grimshaw” among other insults.

“When your mum rings you and it’s a bollocking down the telephone, then of course you begin to get the picture. Humble pie is something that from this day on I’ll be eating for the rest of my life.”

¹ http://thedarkside.hk/2009/05/26/a-pretty-big-deal-indeed-langham-vids-removed

² http://hongkong-life.blogspot.com/2009/05/langham-hotels-big-deal-promotion-makes.html

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