Companies spend millions, if not BILLIONS of money on advertising every year. Sometimes, they make a great campaign that’s still remembered decades after, like Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?”. But, sometimes, they make a terrible campaign that makes one wonder, “What were they thinking?”/
I’ll start with Cartoon Network’s 2007 campaign to promote the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie by putting LED placards all around Boston. These placards got mistaken for bombs and caused the city of Boston to shut down.
The idea was to make a hamburger for adults, so there would be a menu item for parents who wanted something that was something better than regular hamburger items.
So what was the ad campaign? It showed kids eating the burger to prove they were grown up. So it didn’t look like it was for the audience it was developed for.
I humbly submit Pepsi’s 2006 “brown and bubbly” ad campaign from the Super Bowl. Whoever thought the combination of brown and bubbly sounded appetizing must have been on Coke.
That was a shame, as the whole line (they made a grown up Filet O Fish and chicken sandwhiches, also) of the Arch Deluxe sandwiches was perhaps the last/only thing I really liked there.
I forget the product they were flogging (foot cream?) ca. 1970, but I can’t forget the image of a hot blonde perched on a bar stool, flashing her bare feet and asking me “Don’t you just love beautiful feet?”
Crystal Pepsi. C’mon people, it’s just Pepsi that looks like 7-Up
Dominos Avoid the Noid
Where’s Herb was mentioned upthread, but it’s bad enough to repeat. This is just one little commercial. BK built a massive promotional campaign about “The only person in America who had never had a burger from Burger King”
Joe Isuzu, the corporate spokesperson who lied his way through every commercial
And last but not least, the legendary Nissan 300ZX “GI Joe vs. Ken” ad. This commercial cost a buttload of money to produce, won a buttload of creative awards, and actually caused sales of the 300 ZX to drop. Why? Many theories abound, but here’s mine. You never get a good look at the actual car. In fact, if you didn’t see the Nissan logo for the last three seconds (that’s 5 percent of the length of the ad!) you wouldn’t even know it was a car commercial.
I don’t remember the exact item, but sometime in the early ‘80s there was an ad campaign for some feminine hygiene product (tampons? napkins?) that didn’t last an entire week. The tagline? “Look for the box with the dots.”
No music teacher, band director, or orchestra director will ever buy an Infinity based on this commercial. Setting up kids for ridicule is just not the way to go.
I saw this detergent commercial once ca. 1975, and it was apparently pulled off the air immediately afterward:
MOTHER: (Looking at teenaged daughter’s soiled party dress) What are all these stains? DAUGHTER: That’s ice cream … that’s chocolate syrup … and that’s where Tommy’s hot dog dripped on me. Great party! (Twirls)
There was a 2017 commercial for Pepsi that tried to co-opt the Black Lives Matter movement to sell soda. They pulled the ad after only one day so its damage was limited.
And it got Nissan sued by Mattel! But did it actually cause sales of the 300ZX to drop, or did it simply fail to turn around already declining sales, because in Nissan’s typical fashion they hadn’t updated the car since like 1990 and it was starting to look outdated compared to its competition?
ISTR a long story in The Wall Street Journal that claimed sales dropped during the campaign, Nissan dealers protested, and the result was the ad campaign being replaced by a traditional Big Sale ad. The closest thing I can find to corroborate it is this cite where “dealers grumbled that the spot was not selling cars.” Everything else I found that mentioned 1996 ZX sales points out that by then Z car prices had increased dramatically because of the Yen/Dollar exchange rate, so your take on it may be more accurate than my memory.
Not so much a campaign, but more a specific commercial. This one aired when I was living in Quebec for university (there were French-language versions with much of the same cast as well). The broad, garish mugging always made my skin crawl. On a whim, looked it up on YouTube for this thread and it popped up right away, so I can’t be the ony person who remembers it.
