The kind of thing which makes you say “how could they possibly have thought this was a good idea?”
Australian supermarket promoting the freshness of their produce on ANZAC day, the national holiday in rememberance of fallen soldiers.
Woolworths takes down Anzac ‘Fresh in our Memories’ website after social media backlash
We have a new contender
A local bank once did a mailed ad campaign that went along the lines of:
“Tired of living with your parents? Check out our mortgage rates” and stuff along the lines of your parents won’t be doing your laundry anymore.
Like have they never heard of renting?
That one Pepsi ad where there is a protest and a woman gives a cop a pepsi so they’re all friends now. This was around the time of the first Trump admin and BLM protests.
Decades ago, Coca-Cola was trying to enter the market in Saudi Arabia. They ran an ad where “pilgrims” walked around a giant coke bottle, in the same way that Muslim pilgrims in Mecca walk around the Kaaba during Hajj and Umrah. It was very, very poorly received, to say the least, and many attribute it as the main reason why Pepsi has dominated the market instead of Coca-Cola.
How deliciously blasphemous. Makes me almost want to drink a Coke. Almost.
How convenient!
Blizzard’s “Do you guys not have phones?” blunder during the Diablo Immortal reveal
that wasn’t really a campaign or ad, just a gaff made by an out of touch dipshit during the reveal. It was still tonedeaf, sure, but it was hardly Blizzards marketing intention.
An out of touch dipshit? It was the principal game designer from blizzard lol. Plus pretty certain the “dipshit” in question was also not a fan of the mobile only idea.
We’ve just had a campaign on our city’s public transport trams that said “I’m identifying as a trolleybus”.
During pride month, nonetheless.
tramsgender
Is this a slur against the autistic?
Don’t be so tramsphobic!
We had something similar, but it was just a play on the word transport and was just a normal bus and only for the pride parade we had, thankfully.
And
Nah, those are brilliant
I work in 911 dispatch, and there’s a couple crematoriums in the county I work for. Once in a while they call to give us a heads-up when they’re doing a cremation in case anyone calls about smoke.
We enter it as a “controlled burn” notification for our fire department, which I suppose it technically is, but it makes me chuckle a little that we’re entering the same way we would as if someone was burning yard waste or having a bonfire or something.
I don’t know how often they actually do cremations, I assume it’s pretty frequent, and I’m not always the one getting the call, but based on how often I’ve seen these calls go in I don’t think they do it for every cremation. I remember hearing somewhere through the grapevine that when the deceased is extremely obese they tend to really smoke up, so I kind of suspect those are the ones where they give us a heads-up.
Reminds me of an old billboard screw-up in Finland.
One billboard (I can’t remember what the ad was actually for) was quoting an old saying: “If sauna, tar and booze won’t help…” (“…the disease is going to kill you”)
Next to it was an ad for a private clinic. “We’ve got everything to keep you healthy”
Peak of advertising, I bet these pictures spread on internet like wild fire
I once saw a billboard that only had text and a picture of some guy.
The text read “You can’t block this ad”
It made me so irrationally angry and I still to this day don’t even know what they were advertising for.
I’d guess it would be the owner of the billboard advertising the space. I’ve definitely seen that before, often accompanied by a “x thousand people see this every day!” type message.
Advertising advertising is one of the most hilarious things to me.
I hate ads on principle but an ad for an ad is just a level of debauchery I can barely fathom
You looked! See!? Bench ads work!
Ooh, I saw something like that once. What they haven’t considered is that you could just cover it up. Hey presto, blocked.
Ooh, I saw something like that once. What they haven’t considered is that you could just cover it up. Hey presto, blocked.
idk why but that’s actually very funny to me, I actually loled when I res your comment. That’s some stupid shit I would do if I had money to burn
Amazon spent millions on a single Ring ad during the Super Bowl that was so poorly received it killed a multi-million dollar business deal.
To be clear, all the companies involved are the worst of the worst, so fuck them, but all they had to do was nothing and it would have turned out better (for them, worse for the rest of us).
The latest I can think of is Gwyneth Paltrow’s ad for a luxury condo project on stolen Palestinian land by Israel.
That’s a good one.
Just in general, I get the feeling that she’s not all there. You can probably sell her on anything.
Holy shit I already hated the woman but this is next level. Got any proof?
Didn’t think she could sink any lower and yet here we are
Just search for it on YouTube. Gwyneth Paltrow Israel ad.
shes been selling scams for quite a while, not surprising she is willing to do this.
That old Saturn Ion commercial. A car ad about a world without cars, accidentally showing what a complete waste of space their own product is.
IMO, the easiest answer is always gonna be literally any pro genAI ads, so I’mma go with something different.
I don’t remember the brand, but it was this car ad where someone sealed themselves in their car in their garage and was doing the thing where you set it up so the emission fumes backfire into the vehicle and you commit suicide that way. The ad basically boiled down to how their car was so clean you couldn’t kill yourself off the emission fumes and shit.
I really hope anyone involved with it and/or approved it were either fired and/or had to take some sensitivity course because suicide is something you should never joke about.
That Pepsi ad during BLM.
In hindsight this has to be a far right psy op. It was a year after Trump was elected and they definitely wanted to see an end to both the BLM and MeToo movements.
And The Boys remake of it a couple years later
