Every weekday, PR Daily associate editor Alan Pearcy highlights the day’s most compelling stories and amusing marginalia on the Web in this, #TheDailySpin.

I’ve heard of customers being pissed off, but this incident take it a tad too literally. In the U.K., retailer Harvey Nichols angered patrons when an advertisement for a recent sale featured models who appear to have urinated themselves. The promotion is accompanied by the tagline, “Try to contain your excitement.” A spokeswoman for the store told Huffington Post that the campaign was a play on a line in “Pretty Woman” when Julia Robert’s character exclaims that the opera was so good, she almost peed her pants. Obviously.

It’s still probably best to relieve yourself in the restroom, although advertisements might soon follow you there. The Los Angeles Times reports that public bathrooms mirrors could be the next big marketing medium.



Meanwhile, Tumblr appears to be making a rise as the next big social media platform. According to Advertising Age, the online site recently unveiled its first major brand campaign as part of a month-long deal with Adidas.

[Read: Clever PR Tumblrs to waste time on]

I wonder if a saturated social media market has anything to do with Facebook’s sharply decelerated growth rate. Visits to the online network in the U.S. grew just five percent in the last year, the slowest growth since comScore began tracking the site’s data in 2008.

Still, not everyone seems down on the social network. Case in point: Artist Hong Yi who crafted this awesome portrait of CEO and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg simply using books. Watch the time-lapse video to see her finished work, which she appropriately titled, “Facebook.”



Barely any time lapsed in Twitter’s 15-second spot during Sunday’s national NASCAR race on TNT that it used to market hashtags. It is the first time the social media site has aired a TV commercial.



Hashtags might help your company build popularity or buzz on Twitter, but according to a recent study from corporate communications and digital languages professor Marco Camisani Calzolari, brands should be more concerned about who is following them rather than their number of followers. His research found that up to 46 percent of a company’s followers could be generated by robots, or bots.

With all the effort that goes into growing a social networking presence, it makes you value the efforts of an online strategist such as Jaunique Sealey. While working at Atom Digital on Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” social media campaign, Sealey helped build one of the largest online media empires we’ve seen yet. Sealey explained to Mashable that one big mistake community managers and planners make is chasing after new platforms without first understanding why people are using them.

[Read: 5 secrets to staying sane when you manage social media]

Of course, one of the biggest mistakes anyone can make in their job is not giving their brain a rest. Taking a break or even engaging in some midday meditation can actually boost your productivity around the office.

Kids advocacy organization Children Now hopes the Federal Communications Commission will give product placement a break, as least as far as programming aimed at youngsters is concerned. The group argues that "in the absence of clear and enforceable restrictions, children's programmers are likely to start using many of the interactive marketing techniques now being used in programs intended for teen or general audiences."

It’s the absence of the big O that’s left a void in daytime programming. Since “The Oprah Winfrey Show” went off the air, the 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. time slots have struggled to win in the TV ratings, with audiences no longer sticking around to watch local news, according to The New York Times.

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