If you owned a restaurant and your food was making your customers sick all the time, would you fire the truck driver who makes the deliveries?
If you owned a football team that couldn't score points, would you dismiss the ticket taker at the stadium?
Okay, enough.
Carnival, the world's biggest and most beleaguered cruise line, for a year or more has been getting bad press from engine fires and propulsion problems and people (allegedly) jumping overboard. So what does Carnival do?
It fires the ad agency.
There may be a legitimate reason for not inviting its incumbent agency, Havas Media, to apply for a renewal. The invitations made reference to the negative publicity Carnival has been facing, inferring that somehow the ad agency was in some way responsible. Since ad agencies don't usually hire engineers or mechanics or first responders, it's hard to imagine how any one could be fingered for bad press.
For bad advice, perhaps, but Carnival's problems have been products and not advertising. By Carnival's including "negative publicity" in its ad agency search, the expression "not what it is but what it appears to be" just might apply.
A classic case of shooting the messenger.
Who cares? Probably only people working at the ad agency. However, the message Carnival seems to be sending one of deflecting attention from the root of the problem.
Royal Caribbean Brilliance of the Seas
7 nights
September 29, 2013
Boston (return): Portland, Bar Harbor, Saint John, Halifax
Inside: $589
Cost per day: $84
www.royalcaribbean.com