NBC Links Itself to Slaughter

NBC wasn’t wrong to put some of the grotesque Cho pictures and videos on the air and the Net. But it made a catastrophic marketing blunder in the process.

The New York Times reports today, “One aspect that clearly irritated many of NBC’s competitors was the impression of the logo ‘NBC News,’ which the network burned into every image from the material.” They should be quietly overjoyed relieved, not angry.

Why? Because NBC has loudly tied its brand to this psychopath’s ravings. People who remember the visual images will also remember NBC — not that the network had an exclusive but rather that the network spashed its own brand on top of nearly pure evil.

At least one employee at an NBC competitor understood this. According to the Times, Paul Friedman, vice president at CBS News, said, “It may backfire for them to be so closely associated with footage that makes people’s flesh crawl.”