Kickstart: The Hoff returns to the beach

This is not an early April Fool's Day prank from Kickstart. David Hasselhoff, the actor best known in the U.S. for his starring role in Baywatch (and in some areas for his singing career), is starring in a promotion aimed at saving sea turtles that also involves reusable containers.

Or at least, Hasselhoff is appearing in advertisements timed for Earth Day for the home soda machine brand SodaStream, which is pledging that each SodaStream sold during April will "help save one baby sea turtle." And yes, the ad is just as cheesy as you'd expect.

"As part of SodaStream's environmental responsibility and obligation to the planet, we are always looking for ways to do better," said Karin Schifter-Maor, chief marketing officer for SodaStream, part of PepsiCo Inc., in a story from the website HFN Digital. "With this ... campaign, we are engaging people to not only keep the oceans clean from single-use plastic waste, but also giving them the opportunity to save endangered baby sea turtles around the world."

Actual specifics on how the donations from SodaStream will benefit the group SeeTurtles.org or how each purchase will affect an individual sea turtle have not been released.

Meanwhile, another big brand is pushing to clean up its own items, or at least encourage its customers to help it clean up.

McDonald's Norway restaurants have launched a new ad campaign emphasizing customers' need to "take away your takeaway."

The ads don't single out plastics, but instead emphasize the need to properly dispose of any of its packaging and bags, our sister paper Advertising Age writes.

A pilot project with Keep Norway Clean also aims to prevent "unconscious" littering.

"We're responsible for one of the biggest and most visible parts of littering," said Mari Husby, McDonald's Norway senior marketing manager, in a statement. "We're definitely not pleased when we see trash from our restaurants lying around. This is a big problem for our communities, cities and the environment. With our size and influence, we can do a lot better than we do today."

During the early days of COVID-19's arrival in the U.S., 90 workers at Braskem Americas plants in Pennsylvania and West Virginia agreed to take on a "28-day shift," living at the plant to make sure production of materials key to medical equipment wouldn't be impacted by a shutdown.

They were hailed as heroes, for good reason.

I doubt the hundreds of workers currently living and sleeping at auto assembly plants in Shanghai owned by General Motors Co. and SAIC Motor Corp. will receive the same level of accolades during a rise in COVID cases in the Chinese port city.

It's not that the work isn't important to the economic health of a global auto industry and the economy of one of China's biggest population centers, home to 26 million people. And the auto industry isn't the only one using a "closed loop" process — a bubblelike arrangement where workers sleep, live and work in isolation from the rest of the world to prevent virus transmission, Reuters reports. But the current moves feel more like they are focused on the way to protect business interests, rather than ensure support for the medical industry.