John Leicester of the Associated Press was one of the writers covering the World Cup who fell for what turned out to be a clever marketing scheme by a Dutch brewery.
“Don’t be fooled by the sob story making headlines at the World Cup about the fun-loving, oh-so-sweet-and-innocent Dutch women who got into trouble with big, nasty FIFA for supposedly doing nothing more innocuous than wearing orange mini-dresses to a game,” Leicester wrote. “This isn’t the tale of good vs. evil that it seems.
“The women knew exactly what they were doing, and their choice of clothes was really just a sneaky marketing ploy to get global attention for a Dutch beer.
“And, wow, did it work.
“The list of media that got hooked, line and sinker, is far, far, far longer than the women’s hemlines.
“We all got ambushed, nearly tripping over ourselves to lend a sympathetic ear to their claims that FIFA and its henchmen had taken very unkindly to their thinly disguised scam and been a bit rough in putting an end to it. Despite the fierce winter chill, two of the women obliged for the cameras by slipping back into their skimpy dresses Tuesday for interviews in which they recounted, over and over, their terrible ordeal.
“‘My phone is ringing all day,’ said one of them, Barbara Castelein, as she juggled interview requests. ‘I missed 29 phone calls in half an hour.”
“‘It’s unbelievable.’”
“That is what the brewery’s marketing manager must be saying, too. Without having kicked in a dime to FIFA to help fund the global football party that is the World Cup, his company is getting truckloads of free publicity. More egregiously, it did so by appealing to the basest instincts of men, including this one.
“For those reasons, I won’t name the firm.”
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