The German Meteorological Institute in Berlin has a program that allows companies and individuals to adopt a storm. For a buck short of 300€ ($393), anyone can have their name mentioned over and over on weather reports all around the world.
MINI’s advertising agency Sassenbach thought that adopting a winter storm would be the ideal way to complement the ad campaign that it is currently running on television to promote the all-wheel drive Countryman All4.
On January 24th of this year, MINI paid the Meteorological Institute to name a storm Cooper, and a low-pressure system Minie. Sassenbach reportedly called the idea “wind- and weather-proof.”
Unfortunately the clever marketing plan went haywire when the cold front coming from the Siberia region of Russia hit harder than expected and turned even some of the warmest parts of Europe into an Arctic-like landscape.
The colder regions of the old continent did not fare well: Cooper ended up killing over a hundred people in Poland and in the Ukraine. Almost 1,000 people have been hospitalized in the Ukraine alone for frost bite and hypothermia.
A spokesman for MINI parent company BMW said in a statement that the brand was deeply sorry that the storm had taken such epic proportions and caused so many victims. He added that it was impossible to predict the right or wrong moment to adopt a storm, but that the company would be more careful in the future.
