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In a pair of fun interviews with Vibe and BlackBook, Chester French mentioned Ciroc and how they got Diddy on their mixtape.
Trust me, I know. How did you get so many high-profile artists involved?
... When we called Diddy and were like, “Dude, we wrote a song about Cîroc,” I think that was instantly appealing to him.
D.A.: For drinks, nothing is better to us than just going and grabbing a 40 of Ciroc and chilling out and meeting some biddies. Or a 750 of Ciroc is better actually. It’s like a magnum of Ciroc and just go out and meet some biddies and show off to other biddies if you’ve got some Welch’s grape juice around.
Check out the group's Ciroc themed anthem, "Ciroc Star," released earlier this month.
The Moodie Report has a feature on the one year anniversary of Diageo's partnership with World Duty Free to create Bar 5 at the London Heathrow Airport. Diageo is Ciroc's parent company. I noticed this snippet:
Staff at Bar 5 have developed a range of customised cocktails for T5 customers. Some favourites to emerge include the Aeronaut, made with Ciroc vodka, and the Bloody Mary with Smirnoff vodka.
Following up on last week's report, Charles W. Cherry II of the Florida Courier has part 2 of his report on the recent Ciroc casting call controversy.
"I have cast talent for Diddy and Bad Boy (Entertainment, Combs' company) for the past seven or eight years. He has never, ever requested only a certain type of model. He just wants beautiful models of all ethnicities," [LaShawnna Stanley, CEO of Miami-based Ethnicity Models] said. "Diddy's not a racist and has not requested only White, Latin or light-skinned models in the eight years that I have been casting for him.
"The assumption that he only wanted White, Hispanic or lightskinned Black models was an assumption from that affiliate agency (the Miami-based Tysom Agency). It was not a request of Diddy or Ciroc (the premium vodka brand Diddy markets)."
On Twitter, Clinton Sparks mentioned that the previously announced "Ciroc Star," by Chester French featuring Diddy, will now feature Jadakiss, as well.
Last week, a story about a controversial Ciroc ad casting call was making rounds online among some gossip sites. The controversy came from the fact that the call reportedly requested models who were "white, Hispanic or light skinned African-American." With the source of the document unclear and a lack of credible sources reporting, I decided to wait for the dust to settle a bit and for a writer to get the various sides of the story and get to the bottom of it. It appears this has happened.
Charles W. Cherry II has an insightful piece for the Florida Courier that should bring you up to speed, if you are curious.
According to Dia Simms, the general manager of Bad Boy's marketing division, Blue Flame, the source of the call was Tysum, a talent agency in Miami. Cherry writes:
Though Simms understood the seriousness of the situation, she called any accusation that Combs would discriminate on the basis of skin color “laughable.”
“We go out of our way to book Black models,” she said. “We’ve done hundreds of events featuring thousands of models of every ethnicity over the years. We are a minority-owned company. I am a Black woman. It doesn’t make sense for our company to employ a ‘paper bag’ test in 2009.
“It’s damaging to Ciroc, to our company, and it’s personally hurtful to Mr. Combs,” she fumed. “The fact that this issue resurfaces lets you know how far we have to go as people.”
Via Ken Wheaton.
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