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International Bad Products Awards: Sleeping pills for kids and other 'winners'

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Sleeping pills for children, exploding laptops, lead toys. There is a lot of dubious stuff out there. Lots of dangerous, bad-for you, waste-of-money products that are brazenly pitched to you and me, the hapless consumer. Sometimes the products are so bad you almost have to admire the companies with the chutzpah to put them out there. Almost.

Consumer activists had the same idea. But with a twist. Today, leading global consumer rights groups met in Sydney, Australia to hand out awards for the worst products and the companies that make them. The Consumers International World Congress hopes to hold major corporations accountable for their unrepentant and irresponsible hucksterism.

The envelope, please? And the winners of the 2007 International Bad Products Awards are:

Mattel, Inc. (NYSE: MAT) - Makers of beloved children's toys, much of it covered with lead paint from its many manufacturing plants in China, tops the list of bad products. The company recalled more than 21 million toys from around the world in a seven-week period in 2007. The CEO first blamed China, then admitted the problem lay more with company product design-flaws. The group writes: "This is a classic case of avoiding accountability and shifting responsibility on a global scale. Wherever the fault lies, the safety of consumers was compromised, and this should be the full focus of Mattel's attention, not finger pointing and not blame dodging."

Barbie is gonna be, like, so bummed when she hears about this.

Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) - For unabashedly marketing packaged tap water. While the company rightly points out that the packaging on its popular Dasani brand bottled water doesn't explicitly *say* it's spring water, it doesn't specifically not, either. The product can't even be sold in the UK, France or Germany. But why should Coke change its tactic and give us the real thing when the product continues to sell briskly in the U.S. and South America? The group writes: "By bottling up this universal resource to sell back to us, corporations, such as Coca-Cola, have created a $100 billion industry at a time when one billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. Making profits out of increasingly fragile water supplies is unsustainable, irresponsible, and against the basic rights of consumers everywhere. "

Kellogg Co. (NYSE: K) - For selling junk food to kids. They're GRRRRREEEAAAT!....if you like rolls of fat on your kid's back. Kellogg is king in terms of marketing, known the world over for its food products and breakfast cereals, in particular its sugary kids' cereals. The company recently told the New York Times that 27% of its U.S. advertising budget was spent on targeting kids under 12. But with childhood obesity on the upswing, critics charge that the company has a responsibility to stop marketing its high-sugar, high-fat crap food to kids. A Mexican consumer group (and member of Consumers International) was successful pulling a Frosted Flakes ad off the air. The ad promised that kids could develop amazing physical attributes by eating the cereal...when in fact, Mexican Frosted Flakes contain 40% sugar. The company has agreed to amend some of its advertising, but it's sure dragging its feet. Maybe it's that sugar crash.

Finally, for Best of Show:

Takeda Pharmaceutical Co.-- For pitching sleeping pills to kids. The U.S. arm of this $10 billion Japanese pharma company took out a "reminder" ad on U.S. airwaves, using school buses, pictures of chalk boards and the like to remind users that "it's back to school season," time to reorder your sleeping pills.

Huh? Big Pharma can be shameless, we know. But which Madison Avenue think tank came up with this one? While the ad technically met FDA advertising criteria, it was rather strongly slanted toward children, for which the medication is not deemed safe. Critics screamed foul, but it still took the FDA six months to get around to telling Takeda to get the ad off the air. CI says, "This case demonstrates the lengths to which some drug companies will go to increase sales of their products...and how weak regulation can foster irresponsible corporate behavior."

The PR folks at these companies are probably not going to have a nice Halloween, dealing with the fall-out from these "awards." But then that's just the point.

And at least none of the companies cited are in the business of making Halloween costumes. Saturday Night Live fans may want to take a trip down memory lane with this video:

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Last updated: July 04, 2009: 02:26 AM

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