Baby goods company Graco is recalling its 2010 Harmony high chairs. 24 children have been injured after their Graco Harmony high chairs tipped over or became unstable.

The screws and plastic brackets holding the legs onto the chair came loose or cracked, making the high chair unsafe. The recall affects 1.2 million Graco high chairs in the US, and about 35,000 in Canada, according to the Graco recall notification.

Graco wants you to stop using the high chair immediately and obtain a repair kit from them. You can also call (877) 842-3206 if you’ve been affected. See the entire recall notice here.

In a 2,200-page report released yesterday, a court examiner said that Lehman Bros.’ former CEO Dick Fuld, three CFOs, and auditor may be held liable for certain aspects of the company’s collapse, thanks to some artistic accounting. MarketWatch sums up the report’s most important findings:

The report cited a practice known internally as “Repo 105,” in which Lehman allegedly used repurchase agreements — the temporary exchange of assets for cash — that were structured as sales so that the leverage could be moved off the firm’s balance sheet…Lehman may have already been insolvent on Sept. 2, 2008, almost two weeks before its Sept. 15 bankruptcy filing rocked the financial world and helped send the stock market into a nosedive.

The Valukas report also said evidence exists to support a professional malpractice claim against Lehman auditor Ernst & Young, as the firm “took no steps to question or challenge the non-disclosure by Lehman of its use of $50 billion of temporary, off-balance sheet transactions,” according to the Journal.

Bloomberg Television has a good interview with former Lehman CEO Brad Hintz. I found Hintz’s comments about his former CEO Dick Fuld (they start at 4 minutes 45 seconds) especially telling. Hintz is careful when he talks about his former coworker, but does offer insight on how Fuld’s management style affected the company’s accounting. He also talks about Wall Street’s tendency to let minor statement incursions, for lack of better terms, slide.

(Video provided by Bloomberg Television)

Bank of America recently experienced a home seizure FAIL. The bank ransacked a woman’s home, padlocked her doors shut, and seized her parrot–by accident. The bank accidentally foreclosed on her home, even though her mortgage payments were up to date. She is rightfully suing them. ABCNews has the story:

Angela Iannelli returned home one day in October to find her house ransacked, doors padlocked and pet parrot Luke gone. But it wasn’t a burglar. It was Bank of America. The bank had repossessed her home even though the mortgage was up to date.

As the number of foreclosures increases across the country, experts say, so do mistakes, such as mixing up names and addresses as they are passed from department to department.

“Bankster” is pretty cliched by now, but this story fits the term like a glove.

Seven US states are investigating market abuse by seed giant Monsanto. Attorneys general in Ohio, Texas, Virginia, Iowa, Illinois, and two more states are investigating Monsanto’s competitive practices. The US Justice Department is also investigating marketing at Monsanto. Bloomberg has more on Monsanto’s brewing storm:

Monsanto rose to dominance via its genetically engineered Roundup Ready seed line, which was in 93 percent of the soybeans and 82 percent of the corn produced in the U.S. last year. The gene Monsanto adds to the seeds allows crops to withstand use of its Roundup weed killer.

Of Monsanto’s $11.7 billion in revenue in the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2009, $7.3 billion came from sales and licensing of seeds and seed genes. Revenue grew by an annual average of 17% from 2004 to 2009, as earnings expanded eight-fold to $2.11 billion, driven by genetically engineered products and acquisitions of other seed companies.

Monsanto will take part in a hearing on March 12, the first of a series of government-sponsored hearings on agriculture and competition, according to Bloomberg. The Monsanto hearings are part of a torrent of regulator activity on big agriculture.

Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant (yes, you heard right) is accustomed to these kinds of investigations. According to the Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette,

The legal and public relations fights are the latest battles for the Scotland native (Hugh Grant) who rose from demonstrating weed killer in barley fields to the company’s top executive in his 29 years with Monsanto.

The company said it’s working to help double food production by 2050 as the planet’s population reaches 9 billion and portrays itself as a friend of farmers with its americasfarmers.com Web site.

If history repeats itself, the Feds, state officials, farmers, and companies (mainly DuPont) supporting the latest wave of allegations are going to have a tough time getting anything out of Monsanto.

If you’re like me and find Monsanto’s behavior both problematic and dangerous, I encourage you to sign a petition here.

Actress Lindsay Lohan is suing E-Trade after recognizing herself in one of the company’s baby ads. The ad features a baby named Lindsay who steals boyfriends and is a known “milkaholic.” Lohan’s lawyer claims E-Trade used the actress’s “name and characterization” for business use without approval, according to the New York Post, which has more:

The lawyer said that since the spot was seen by hundreds of millions of people watching the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics finals, the firm has garnered great profits. She says Lohan is owed $50 million in exemplary damages, plus another $50 million in compensatory damages.

“Many celebrities are known by one name only, and E-Trade is using that knowledge to profit,” Ovadia said.

Too bad all the time, ego, and drugs it took to conceptualize this suit can’t be replaced by marketable acting skills…

The Move Your Money campaign is gaining traction. Move Your Money, a campaign created by the Huffington Post, Roosevelt Institute, and Institutional Risk Analysis (IRA), helps you transfer your hard-won stash from bailed-out bankster institutions to local and community banks. The website, MoveYourMoney.info, explains:

Thousands of people have pledged to move their money away from the casino-style Too Big To Fail banks and give their money to community banks and credit unions. This site was set up as a modest home for the effort. A seed. But the idea will only have an impact if others keep it going from here.

There is no official organization here. It’s a volunteer project. If you have ideas about how this idea can grow, send us a note and we’ll display the best ideas in the Comments section of the site.

Move Your Money even lists instructions on how to close your old account. These are actually helpful–it is hard to get enough personal momentum to shut down an account you’ve been using for years.

I can attest to the power of going local when it comes to banks. About six months ago, I opened an account with my local credit union, because they had the best HSA (health savings account) deal in town. The credit union, called Elevations, has blown away my expectations of what a bank can and should do. They nice and helpful when I need something (sorry, Chase, but your people scowl a lot). Their fees are lower. They offer financial services on-site, as well as classes on financial planning and investing. As far as I can see, they currently have some of the best mortgage rates in town.

Importantly, the bank also cares about the well-being of the community. By patronizing it, I feel like I’m doing something to benefit the community I live in, not anonymous Wall Street financiers or bailout recipients.

If you have the time and drive, I encourage you to join Move Your Money.

The Kneber botnet, a malicious program that steals login information, has compromised 2,500 organizations and an estimated 75,000 computers worldwide. Affected systems include Facebook, Yahoo, some banks, and companies such as Merck.

PCWorld has a good Q&A about the Kneber botnet:

Where is Kneber?

Kneber is targeting login credentials for online social networks, e-mail accounts and online financial services. The top sites with stolen login credentials, according to Netwitness’ report are Facebook, Yahoo, hi5, metroflog, sonico and netlog. While the focus has been on e-mail and social networks, Kneber is now targeting banking sites as well.

To protect yourself, don’t download suspicious attachments, and be careful what websites you visit. Also, update your browser’s security settings so that it can alert you about potentially malicious websites.

The world of marketing is a tricky thing. Most companies need to get the word out about their new product or service, but finding the best way to do it is often easier said than done when you want to be memorable, informative and entertaining all at the same time. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Lose so very badly.

Here are nine examples of poorly conceived marketing campaigns that left the companies behind them with pie on their face.

The Campaign: Panasonic Woody

The Plan: Market a new touch screen PC with Woody Woodpecker as a spokesman

The Story: Back in the 90’s, Panasonic was all about making the Japanese home PC the awesomest thing it could be. User friendly, cool and down with the modern age. So naturally they got Woody Woodpecker to be the spokesman because 200 year old American cartoons really speak to Japanese consumers. With their Civil War era cartoon tie-in secured, the marketing team took the next logical step by naming the computer “The Woody.” The Woody, as you might expect, was superior to other computers because of its touch screen capabilities, which were naturally called “Touch Woody.” When an American finally explained why this made so many foreigners laugh like children, Panasonic managed to drop the “Touch Woody” name and shift focus to some of the PC’s other features including its support system, the much more maturely named “Internet Pecker.”

The Campaign: Wang Computers

The Plan: Think up a clever, memorable slogan to advertise Wang Computers

The Story: Wang was founded by someone named A. Wang and thus never really had a chance of not being the butt of numerous jokes from the minds of 12 year olds, or just people who think like 12 year olds. Not putting much effort into bettering its image or thinking too hard on how to make the word Wang not sound like a joke, they released the slogan “Wang Cares” on a snickering United Kingdom. While it’s nice to imagine yourself as a having some manner of corporate accountability, Wang Cares sounds a hell of a lot like wankers which just means masturbators and isn’t really the most effective way to sell a computer.

The Campaign: Renault 14

The Plan: Market the Renault by drawing on its similarities to pears, since they’re kind of the same shape

The Story: Deciding that likening an ugly car to an ugly fruit was a good idea, French automaker Renault tried to launch a campaign that compared the Renault 14 to a pear. The fact that “poire,” in French, can mean both pear and gullible was apparently lost completely on the manufacturers, as was the fact that no one really wants a car that looks like a pear, basically meaning it’s a short, fat ass automobile and is the vehicular equivalent of taking a ride on that little psychic lady from the Poltergeist movies. On top of this, the car had an issue with body corrosion, leading people to start calling it “the rotten pear,” as “worthless crap” was not entirely media friendly and didn’t really include a pun.

The Campaign: Calvin Klein Scary Porno Ads

The Plan: Since sex sells, make some gritty, realistic commercials featuring young people in various states of undress

The Story: In the mid 1990’s, Calvin Klein, already pretty damn successful at what they did, decided it might be fun to make every human on earth who is not required by law to tell people when they move into the neighborhood uncomfortable by launching a series of ads featuring teenagers in a basement. Oh, and also they were mostly naked and being filmed by an unseen lecherous cameraman who asked inappropriate questions and told teenage boys they looked like they worked out. The campaign managed to get the FBI to investigate to see if anything illegal had occurred and Calvin Klein pulled the ads and issued an apology, because who knew insinuations of pedophilic porno wouldn’t capture the hearts of America?

The Campaign: Sony PSP

The Plan: Tap into the online youth market by trying to create a viral, amateur-feel campaign

The Story: Sony, generally considered by many to be pretty reliable and cutting edge when it comes to cool home electronics, decided to put the marketing of their PSP system in the hands of complete and total assholes. Treading into the dangerous waters of viral marketing, the ad agency Zipatoni made a terrible, terrible video of some dude rapping about how he wanted a PSP for Christmas and posted it on Youtube along with links to a website. That alone might not have killed Sony, but they added fake comments on Youtube and other sites, including hip slang filled conversations like this one put them over the edge:

here’s the deal::: i (charlie) have a psp. my friend jeremy does not. but he wants one this year for xmas.

so we started clowning with sum not-so-subtle hints to j’s parents that a psp would be teh perfect gift. we created this site to spread the luv to those like j who want a psp!

Wow, look at all that bad grammar, this must be legit and awesome. Let’s all get PSPs. Never once was it mentioned that Sony was behind this at all and everything was presented as being strictly fan made. The campaign was torn apart viciously and exposed over at Somethingawful.com, and managed to create near unheard of hatred amongst Sony’s target audience. Sony responded with what may be an apology but mostly comes off as the sad attempt of a clueless parent to speak the language of the kids with gems like this “As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn’t a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony” in it. The videos were taken down and the site now redirects to Haagen-Dazs.com.

The Campaign: Anti-Drug Campaign

The Plan: Alert the public to some of the unknown dangers associated with illegal drugs in an effort to further curb drug use

The Story: It’s not just corporate America that can screw up royally when it comes to trying to sell a line of garbage to the general public. The Office of National Drug Control Policy managed to spend nearly one billion dollars on an anti-drug campaign, including $10 million on commercials that suggested if you use drugs you support terrorism. A five year evaluation of the campaign showed absolutely nothing. No evidence whatsoever that drug use was being curbed in the slightest as a result of the commercials and advertising, which is stunning considering how those “this is your brain” egg commercials from the 80’s managed to completely eliminate heroin and crack.

Making things worse for the anti-drug campaign was some emerging studies that showed children were more inclined to be curious about trying illegal drugs after see anti-drug ads than if they had seen no ads at all, meaning the government had been spending about $1 billion to make kids wonder if horse tranquilizers were a delicious alternative to pixie stix.

The Campaign: McDonald’s “I’d Hit it”

The Plan: Appeal to the hip, younger crowd by using slang terms they’re familiar with in advertisements

The Story: Realistically McDonald’s probably doesn’t even need to advertise anymore. They’re located on pretty much every other block in every town on the face of the Earth. If you don’t know about McDonald’s at this point, odds are you will never know and likely don’t want to know.

Nonetheless, McDonald’s strives to continually think up new slogans and campaigns on a regular basis to keep themselves at the forefront of Mcminds all around the world. And back in 2005, they figured they’d be hip and trendy if they co-opted some of that hip slang the kids love so much. Unfortunately, no one on staff in McDonalds marketing has apparently ever spoken to anyone under the age of 30 in person and thus had no idea what they were talking about. The result was the “I’d hit it” campaign for their dollar menu, featuring the image of a young man staring longingly at a burger with the words “I’d Hit It” separating the two of them. This would have been fine if we live din a world where no one has a problem with someone basically saying they want to have sex with a hamburger, but we don’t. And that’s what “I’d hit it” means.

We can only guess at what marketing execs assumed it meant, but you know what happens when you make assumptions.

The Campaign: Molson Hunts for College Drunks

The Plan: Use social media to run a contest in an effort to gain cheap, easy publicity and extend the brand to target markets

The Story: Molson, one of the biggest brewers in Canada, has a pretty firm market share in the beer drinking world. But lord knows you never want to slip when it comes to advertising booze as your customer base is made up entirely of people prone to black out and forget things, so you need to keep your name on their slurry lips at all times.

Because 19-24 year olds are such a key demographic for selling just about everything, Molson launched a campaign to target university students. While legal drinking age in the US may be 21, in many Canadian provinces it’s or 19. The campaign, launched on Facebook, asked students to send in their craziest party pics in an effort to track down the top party school in the country with the winner getting a trip to Cancun where presumably they would drink tea and learn about Mexican culture. This translates into “how drunk can you get on camera?” The problem, of course, is the number of 17 and 18 year old university students as well as most schools’ desire not to be known nationally as “that drunk school.”

Universities immediately called out Molson for promoting irresponsible drinking and many parents took the time to register complaints as apparently mom and dad don’t like the idea of paying for their child’s education then having that same child’s drunken shenanigans at school used in beer promotions. Who knew? Molson ended the promotion early claiming they had only been interested in promoting school spirit and not excessive drinking, which seems like a plausible motivation for the country’s 3rd largest brewery.

The Campaign: GM Can’t Do Viral Marketing

The Plan: Use viral marketing tactics and the element of user interactivity to allow people to create their own ads

The Story: General Motors had the brilliant idea of letting the public tinker with interactive software to make their very own ads online. Anyone who’s ever seen what happens to an unlocked marquee outside of a business should know right away why this is a bad idea, as letting anyone have carte blanche to say whatever they want about your product is not a good idea. In fact, it’s hard to imagine why GM thought this would turn out any better than it did.

Nonetheless, GM rolled out their campaign which let users pick video clips, soundtracks their own text-based messages to overlay on the finished product. Predictably, negative ads were produced by the boatload. People accused GM of contributing to global warming, of making poor quality vehicles or protested the war in Iraq. And those were the “good” ones. Other people chose the more “internet prankster” tack of simply lacing their commercials with obscenities.

GM’s bizarre response was to point out how the campaign was technically a success as they’d received millions of hits and most of the responses were in fact positive, while blindly ignoring the fact they’d received so many hits due to the sharing of the negative ads and no one was watching any of the so-called positive ones.

One other note: Upon investigating this story further, I would like to say that we have been thoroughly impressed with the kindness, understanding and helpfulness that Old Spice has displayed in helping us get to the bottom of it.

Moral of the story: we’ll no longer jump into stories that exploit incorrect perceptions, and carefully confirm our source information before taking stories public.

In light of increased government scrutiny of its cars, Toyota has announced a worldwide recall of its Prius hybrids. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Toyota’s quality chief Shinichi Sasaki said at a press conference (in Japan) that the problematic brake systems in the recalled cars “meet safety standards,” a comment implying the company isn’t required legally to recall the vehicles. But Toyota decided to take action and update software that controls the brake system in order to “be in accordance with the spirit” of those standards, Mr. Sasaki said.

In the U.S., Toyota is recalling about 133,000 2010 Prius cars and 14,500 2010 HS250h cars. In Japan, Toyota will recall 223,000 hybrid vehicles, while the number should total 52,900 vehicles in Europe.

Being defensive isn’t going to help Toyota now–it’s too late. They need to start being proactive, by getting a killer PR firm, for example. Especially if brakes aren’t the only Prius problem.