This Week It's All About Pepsi, Nivea, O'Reilly, Trump...Oh and An Agency Added to the Roundup Lawsuit

• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, April 5, 2017

Well, it's been a busy week so far. Pepsi debuted (and pulled) that much-maligned Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner and Nivea pulled its White Purity ad. So much for insightful forethought among marketers this week. Oh and Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor is losing boatloads of advertisers after it came to light that the show’s host Bill O'Reilly was at the center of Fox paying out $13 million in sexual harassment settlements on behalf of O'Reilly. Oh, and that's not all, Trump defended O'Reilly saying he didn't do anything wrong calling him a "good person.”

What is going on? It's like we're living in some kind of twilight zone or some sort of experimental bubble that, at any point, is going to burst revealing an audience of aliens laughing at us and shouting, "Oh we were just kidding, you can all go back to your normal lives now."

Anyway, St. Louis ad agency Osborn Barr has been added to the ongoing lawsuit against Roundup which alleges the herbicide's active ingredient, glyphosate is carcinogenic and tied to cases of non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. Joining the 231 cases already filed against Roundup, Osborn Barr has been added by LA law firm Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman. The suit claims the agency was complicit in representing the product as having “no unreasonable risks to human health or the environment" and that "deceptive" claims were made calling the product "safer than table salt" and "practically nontoxic." That last one is quite laughable. I mean something is either non-toxic or it isn't. 

Commenting on the suit and the agency's involvement, environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy said, “It was integral to the marketing of glyphosate. There was no way for our clients to understand the risk they were taking because of the deception of Monsanto and Osborn & Barr.”

The agency isn't commenting but Monsanto VP of Global Strategy Scott Partridge said the argument implicating the marketers behind Roundup seem "contrived."

And defending Monsanto and Roundup, Partridge added, “It’s obvious that the plaintiffs’ lawyers are having difficulty confronting the 800 studies and the monumental evidence that demonstrates that glyphosate does not cause cancer.”