Apr 30, 2009

Do you believe in Flying Pigs?

Got this picture emailed to me today. Made me laugh, and also got me thinking. Firstly, why are they calling it “swine” flu? Surely “Pig Flu” would make more sense? They didn’t call the “Bird Flu” the “Avian Flu”, did they? Secondly, if you wanted to get the whole world vaccinated with your hyper expensive drugs with all their lovely side effects, what would be the quickest way to do it? Scare everybody to death with a new virus? It’s worked before. This is genius viral marketing.
swine-flu-pic

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Mark
The founder of Attwood Digital, Mark is a digital marketing veteran having been working online since before the dotcom boom. He created the world's first online skip hire service in 2003, has created multiple online courses, lectured on digital marketing and even written a book on the subject. He is also an ICO advisor and crypto-enthusiast.
4 comments
  1. dave
    April 30, 2009

    “Avian Influenza” was a commonly used term, but still, swine flu doesn’t make sense. Its a technical term (swine) mixed with a colloquial term (flu) – the brilliance with bird flu was that the meds to stop h5n1 had a two week shelf life, so it was being stockpiled by every man and his dog, and every two weeks they chucked the old stuff, and bought new stuff.
    The face mask companies also killed it – we had 3 pallets of face masks sitting at work in Phnom Penh.

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  3. Alex
    February 1, 2010

    Fantastic picture!

    Reply
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