January’s brand coverage brought negative headlines for Pfizer & Tesla

December’s brand coverage analysis wrapped up the year with a slew of positive media stories about some of the biggest brands around, but January has reminded us just how quickly negative press can also generate attention, with brands like Pfizer and Tesla bearing the brunt of such high engagement. 

Tesla needs a little less explanation as often the brand is mentioned alongside its CEO or for product-related issues, which we will get to later. Pfizer, however, was the second most written about brand among the top 250 stories in January thanks to a video released by Project Veritas. The video caused quite a stir among conservative publishers, which led to huge levels of engagement. 

The original Project Veritas video, which was released on Rumble, was the biggest piece of content about the issue, earning 17.2k engagements. The video showed a Pfizer executive discussing the company’s explorations of mutating Covid to preemptively develop new vaccines.

Out of the top 250 stories about brands in January, 22 of them were about Pfizer, and specifically six of those reported on the Pfizer and Project Veritas issue. Collectively the six stories earned over 70k engagements. However, the chart above shows the timeline of engagement to Pfizer and Project Veritas overall, as engagement wasn’t in the top 250 stories often.

Published on Jan 25th, the video kicked off days of reporting on the matter from conservative outlets. The other top stories about Pfizer and Project Veritas included The Gateway Pundit’s article about Jordon Walker, the Pfizer executive from the original video being confronted by a Veritas staff member in a coffee shop (15k), and Human Events’ article about the Daily Mail and MSN removing coverage of the issue from their websites (6.8k). 

To put an end to the swarm, Pfizer released a response to the allegations on Jan 27th, stating that they have “not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research.”

The company’s statement has since received 74k engagements — more engagement than any of the top stories from the conservative sphere. 

Let’s take a look at what other brands made our January rankings.

Tesla continued making headlines for vehicle issues

In December we saw high engagement to stories about Tesla owners having problems with their vehicles, and January looked very similar, with the top story about the brand being about a brother and sister who had to stop six times in one day to charge their rented Tesla on a road trip (90k). 

Other articles of interest include one about PepsiCo’s all-electric Tesla Semi’s being towed after only a month of use (21k), and a car battery spontaneously bursting into flames in California (16k). Stories about the danger and malfunction of Tesla vehicles are seeing consistently high engagement month over month, showing the public’s interest and concern in the brand’s products. 

Walmart captured ongoing attention with viral story

While bad news was dominant in January for many brands, that wasn’t exclusively true.

One heartwarming story that carried over from our December brand coverage analysis was about a Walmart cashier who was finally able to retire after a viral TikTok helped to raise $100k in online donations. 

This can happen when a story gains traction towards the end of a month, however, reporting on this story continued well past the first week of January thanks to several local news outlets that kept picking it up. 

Delta receives interest for heartwarming viral video

As we’re seeing happen more often, a video of a Delta flight attendant helping a frightened passenger went viral online, earning the airline some positive coverage about its employees. This has become a theme of our brand coverage recently, with employees associated with the brand at large, especially when looking at local stories.

Local coverage proved to dominate here as well, with a Fox News story that was shared across the publisher’s outlets earning the most engagements (74k). 

January has shined a hard light on some major brands, revealing how fast coverage can shift from positive to negative, but also how brands can react quickly to act on a situation. But even through all the negative we’re able to see that a feel-good story can still thrive among the mix. 

If you’d like to see what the top coverage of brands in 2022 looked like, check out our recent report here.