In a recent blog post to their health advertising corporate blog, Google responds to the scathing accusations of Michael Moore's Sicko by defending big pharma and recommending that they simply throw money at the problem and displace any other ads with their messaging... Seriously, wtf?
I'm no fan of Michael Moore, and although I haven't yet seen Sicko, I'll likely have the same opinion of it as I have had of all his other "documentaries", but this blog post is just awful PR.
Sure, I realize that all successful huge companies are at least a little evil. They have to be in order to crush their competition, but Google's been pretty good at their PR from this angle until now. It's a shame that some boob decided to pick a topic that the public is obviously going to care a lot about due to a blockbuster movie and the incredible momentum already involved in the next presidential election. That alone is a bad idea since you'll always make someone angry. They don't stop there, though. They decide to side with the target of that hugely popular documentary and against the 'little guy' getting screwed by ever hospital and every pharma. Many people will read that blog entry after having seen the movie and visualize Google right on top of the head of that poor child that can't get a transplant or the woman whose insurance would not pay for her ambulance. It's hard to recover from that damage.
What can they do now? All of those huge social network news sites like digg are already linking to the article, and the blogispheere is running in top gear. Just check out the 'links to this article' on the bottom of their page. They can't pull the article down, or remove the links or they'll receive even more criticism. They're stuck.
Anyway, if you're disgusted by them, try using a different product once in awhile. Give Yahoo! Search, MSN, or ask.com a try. It's nice to support the little guy sometimes.