BrandSnark: Good Week/Bad Week for the Big Brands

Good Week: Amazon – The e-commerce giant made its first successful drone delivery, a big step as it beta-tests a far larger “Prime Air” program. A customer in the U.K. (where the program is launching (pun) under a favorable government regulatory environment) ordered an Amazon Fire TV streaming device and a bag of popcorn… a ready-made Saturday night if ever there was one.

Bad Week: American Airlines – Striking a blow for everyone who’s ever endured an interminable delay as their plane sat on the tarmac waiting to take off, the U.S. Department of Transportation fined the carrier $1.6M for repeatedly violating a rule that prohibits long delays after finding several incidents where passengers were made to wait for as long as three hours without being allowed to deplane.

Worse Week: Yahoo – Another season, another revelation of a huge security breach that the company is just discovering. This time, nearly 1 billion subscriber email accounts were hacked in August 2013 and it appears to be unrelated to the hacking of 500 million accounts reported in September. At the moment, you and I have as much of an idea of how this happened as Yahoo top security honcho, who went on record as saying “We have not been able to identify the intrusion associated with this theft.” This latest incident may lead Verizon to ask for a discount of up to $1 billion on its $4.83 billion bid to acquire Yahoo. #damagedgoods