Or did they…!!!
http://www.heinz.co.uk/ourfood/soups
The UK market was obviously more susceptible - and we have Campbells too!
Back in 1997 or so, Corn Nuts had a radio ad that played with some regularity on the stations I listened to. It’s far too blatant to be anything but intentional double entendre, so I guess it’s less “What were they thinking?” than “How did this make it on the air?”
Seventh Generation, a “green products” company, advertises that their toilet paper is “100% Recycled Bathroom Tissue.”
Think about that for a minute. Because clearly, they never did.
Sorry, but I loved every moment of that ad campaign. The radio commercials, the hotline, the print ads, it all went together really well. It was a beautifully executed campaign.
The soda just tasted like crap. I kept buying it to encourage the advertising, even though it was nigh undrinkable.
“Things are going to be OK”
Racism fail - this one made my jaw drop.
This guy has an interesting take on the OK Soda campaign and suggests that the campaign was a precursor to later, more successful campaigns like the GEICO caveman commercials.
Oh yes, and these racist McDonald’s commercials didn’t work at all (totally NSFW - language and, um, racist):
http:/ /www.youtube.com/watch?v=G79t752Vy9o
(Space inserted between the slashes)
They came back, but not under the brand label “Everybody’s All American”. Really, the biggest fail of their campaign was choosing a long complicated name that nobody could understand was the brand, so confusion = remember what you already know = Campbell’s. If their brand name had actually been “Heinz Soup” at the time, that campaign might have worked.
There is a billboard for a local gym here that reads:
Have you ever been to the gun show?
Then this gym isn’t for you.
Setting aside the fact that I can’t figure out whether or not the gym endorses “gun show” style braggadocio, the ad writer apparently failed to realize that it tells every reader, in spite of their answer, that the gym is not for them.
The MS ads a few years ago that had people trying Vista OS and exclaiming (effectively)“Wow, it’s not as terrible as everyone says!”
and then there’s this
Which rocks … so hard!
Another problem is that the soup can itself is not visible most of the time, and even when it is, it’s not really the center of attention.
Aside from the soup can, the predominant color scheme is red and white.
Calling that racist seems a huge stretch. The juxtaposition CAN be interpreted in an awkward way, but you have to work for it.
I don’t think it’s intentionally racist, but I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to see it as a “before” heavy blak lady gradually transforming into a skinny white “after” lady, either.
It’s the girl in the middle that really does it for me. She just so… between. Lighter and skinnier than one, darker and heavier than the other.
I agree, I don’t think it was intentional. But I think it was a poor execution that somebody should have caught. The Before and After tags stand out, but it’s only on second review I see that the two beige backdrops are skin samples that those tags apply to. Swapping the black one to the middle would have negated the issue.