What are some embarrassing mistakes companies have made in ads? I read that during the 1980s Cola Wars, Coke and Pepsi were in heated competition for the Chinese market, so they both made ads. But Coke’s ad translated as “bite the wax tadpole” and Pepsi’s as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead”. I also read that some company, I think they made clothing, was called Orange, wanted to advertise in the heavily Roman Catholic Republic of Ireland, but nobody bought because the company was called Orange, and orange is the color representing Protestants in Ireland. Things like that.
Coca-Cola story not quite true.
The Pepsi story is a little more believable, although there is some question surrounding it as well.
Another famous one in this regard is the Chevy Nova story.
Quilted Northern featured animated “quilters” using knitting needles.
“You bet your Aspercream” got quickly emended.
Not exactly what you were looking for, but close: About ten years ago, the New York Times ran an Entertainment filler story about mistranslated movie titles. The story alluded to the (erroneous) fact that the chinese name for the Crying Game was Oh No! My Girlfriend Has a Penis!
(It wasn’t actually true, but the Times reported it as if it were. They later printed a retraction. Perhaps the same fact-checker who was supposed to be covering Jayson Blair’s stories worked on that one as well.)
Legend has it someone made and marketed a product called “Head On,” which even after several months of advertising, still no one knew what it did.
Oh, wait.
A couple of years ago, there were ads from some sort of tooth cleaner. Product was a finger cover that you could use to brush your teeth.
The comercials for this had people dancing and saying something like “Rip, Slip, aahhhhhh.”
Now, when I heard the line my mind immediately jumped to putting on a condom. 
The ads didn’t last long. 
How about naming our new diet candy “AYDS”?
-Joe
McDonald’s, not long ago, ran an advertisement with a guy looking at a cheeseburger and saying, “Yeah, I’d hit that.” Apparantly they were trying to target hip, urban youth but were somewhat unclear on the meaning of “hit” as a slang term.
One theory is that they knew very well what they were saying, and knew very well that people laughing at “the big, stupid corporation trying to sound hip but mangling it in a vaguely dirty way” was great publicity.
Or they wanted to expand their customer base to include those inspired by American Pie.
I don’t know whether to be amused, hungry, or . . . turned on.
(looks at friend’s burger)
Yeah, I hit that.
-Joe
Merijeek, perhaps you should post to this thread 
Sgt Schwartz
No, but I lived in China for two years and saw a movie with a horrible translation.
Sixth Sense was called “He’s a Ghost!” in Chinese. This was the unofficial translation that appeared on bootleg DVDs, however.
“You just squeeze, rub, groom and done?”
AYDS appetite supressant had that name for decades before any disease was given a similar name.
Years ago I was working for a game company that made first-person shooters. We hired an outside art company to put together a sellsheet for the product – a one page glossy with game art and bullet points that could be distributed to the media to promote the game.
The dev team wasn’t closely involved in putting the sellsheet together. They were way too busy finishing the game. The producer just dumped a bunch of art assets (models, screenshots, reference art) onto a disk and handed it off to our marketing rep.
When the finished sellsheets came back from the printer none of us did more than glance at them. The main image on the front of the sheet was of a terrorist standing on the roof of a building with crosshairs superimposed on him. It wasn’t a great image but it did a decent job of selling the game. The marketing department started mailing them out.
A few days later one of my junior designers came to me with one of the sellsheets. He said that he’d been looking at the image and that the building looked familiar somehow. (It wasn’t a building from the game – it was a photo of a real-world building with the terrorist photoshopped on top of it.) He was sure he’d seen a picture of it before. He was worried that we might get in trouble for using a real location in our ad.
So I looked a little more closely. There WAS something familiar about the building. It looked like a motel, or a cheap hotel. And it had this distinctive irregular roofline. So I did a little googling … .
It was the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was assassinated. What’s worse, the photograph was taken from the exact spot where James Earl Ray had been standing when he fired the fatal shots!
At some point when the team had been gathering reference materials for the game someone had collected a bunch of images of famous crime scenes. All of those images had been part of the huge data dump that the producer had sent to the artist … but with all the information about the sources removed.
The look on the face of our marketing director when I told her what she’d been mailing out to the media was priceless … .
(Fortunately they’d only sent out a few dozen at that point. The next week they were going to a trade show and would have handed out hundreds of them. The remaining sellsheets were shredded and we were instructed to never ever say anything about it.) 
Wasn’t it Pepsi who debuted a series of ads at last year’s superbowl describing their product as “brown and bubbly”?
THAT sure went away in a hurry.
Many years ago, I was proofing an ad for a financial advisory service. One of the things we were promoting at the time was the tenure and knowlege base of our advisors. We set up the ad to include a list of things an investor would look for in an advisor then go into how our staff had those things. We wanted the ad to target female investors (since we weren’t getting our share of that market), so we decided to make the gender of our hypothetical advisor female.
The ad went out of my hands and into several design/copy revisions. During those revisions, someone decided to get crazy with fonts and enlarge key words for emphasis. However, there was a miscommunication between the copywriter and designer about what the key words were. So across my desk come an ad with the header “What makes you confident in your financial advisor” with the first bullet below it reading…
- She has a firm body of market knowlege and investment experience.
:rolleyes:
Yeah, we changed that copy.
Alamo Rent A Car used to promote their waiting areas. Complete with concession stand, kiddie play area, and changing room. They forgot the fact that no one wants to spend time in line waiting for a car rental.
People can understand, a little, about an airplane that can’t fly due to hazardous weather. They don’t want their car rental company to assume they’re going to be waiting in line for hours.