19 Incredibly Embarrassing Fails In Advertising

OK. Some of these are pretty funny. No need to read anything more than the juxtaposition of the story or billboard headline and the associated ad next to it.
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Most of these compilations are lame, staged or recycled material. This one’s pretty damned funny.

The Barbie one was particularly disturbing. What kind of person advertises ‘adult’ products on a website targeted (for the most part) to little girls? That is just strange.

I laughed my ass off at the Aflac ad. I cannot believe the fear of being watched by a duck is a real thing.

You’d be surprised how many “educational”* game sites have questionable ads.

  • I put educational in quotes, because there are hundreds of sites out there with names like iluvzmesummathgames.net that are just a collection of tower defense games and Happy Wheels knockoffs shamelessly scraped from addictinggames.com and lovingly peppered with ads.

The article in question looked bizarrely serious. I couldn’t tell if it was an elaboration on the original joke or some sort of weird, written-on-autopilot (or even computer-generated) thing. Anatidaephobia is from a Far Side comic. You can find the comic and many elaborations on the theme with a quick image search.

The Aflac ad on the page was priceless, either way. :smiley:

That’s because ads are provided by third-party sources who prize impressions more than sensibility.

That’s because every mope who starts a web site thinks s/he can become rich by signing up with ad pushers, and the mopes range from people who put together crappy sites just to have an anchor for said ads up to, you know, extremely popular sites with a large and intelligent user base.