We already have a thread for the latter, going on five years old now and still active.
What was the name of the company? Crazy Eddie advertised prices that were insane and did very well until it turned out the prices were actually insane in the sense the company was kept afloat only through fraudulent bookkeeping. The ad campaign with a guy screaming “His prices are insane!” was extremely successful though.
That’s a slight exaggeration. Some subway stations and sections of highway were shut down for a couple of hours, but not the whole city and not for long. Still not quite the effect they intended, though!
That looks like the beginning of a particularly dreary John le Carré novel directed by film student who really wanted to be the next Martin Ritt. I guess these people didn’t get the best creative advice:
Of course, the “It’s Toasted” campaign is an anachronism, predating the era of Mad Men by decades, but it is a great illustration of how and why advertising works (or not).
Stranger
Yes but bob’s description ecouraged people to check it out. Yours encourages people to skip past your post.
Burger King also ran an ad for a “Seven Incher” sandwich which featured a woman looking like she was going to perform oral sex on the burger. The ad was also filled with numerous references to “blowing”, “satisfied”, etc. People hated it, the model complained saying they used a stock image of her showing “surprise” and added the burger in front of her face and BK wound up killing the sandwich to put the issue to rest.
Not really NSFW but let's hide the link anyway
https://hips.hearstapps.com/cos.h-cdn.co/assets/14/32/640x871/nrm_1407347990-the_kings_7_incher.jpg
I’m not clear from the OP if by “worst ad campaigns” the focus is “ad campaigns that failed to sell the product” or “ad campaigns we hate”.
The first one. An ad campaign that someone personally hates can still be successful. I’m looking for ad campaigns that turned people away from the product, or otherwise backfired spectacularly, like the example I gave of the 2007 Boston bombing scare.
Yes, the city of Boston was held hostage for a day by a cartoon character and TBS decided to pay them a lot of money for their trouble to maintain goodwill. So it was a failure in the sense of the ad campaign costing much more than expected. However, was it a failure in regards to promoting the television show? Did ratings go down?
In the 1990’s Miller Lite rolled out the “Dick campaign”, featuring a fictional, nerdy ad executive showing off his deliberately stupid promotional ideas. (Sample print ad: Dick with a single can of beer. Caption: “My new idea–the one-pak”.) Reaction was so poor that Miller fired their ad agency, which made the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
In the late 1970’s, Schlitz Beer was still a thing. They ran an ad campaign with the theme “Don’t you dare take a Schlitz drinker’s Schlitz away from him.” For example, a waitress was serving a table of truck drivers and said, “You’re thinking about taking their Schlitz away? Hah! They’ll run you over and turn you into an off-ramp on the expressway!” It made Schlitz drinkers look like mean, aggressive dickheads and was widely mocked as the “Drink Schlitz or we’ll kill you” campaign.
The strangest thing to me is that they were placed at least a day before the whole uproar. My best friend and I were in Boston the day before the story broke and saw one that didn’t seem to be attracting much undue attention at the time. If they were seen as such a possible big threat, how come the fussing didn’t start immediately?
The Mooninites. I almost won one of the real ones at the RSA Security Conference (one of the larger infosec trade shows) back in 2007 - some smallish security firm managed to obtain one and raffled it off.
Did they also fire the Miller execs who approved it?
The same time Schlitz started that ad campaign they also changed their beer so it would be “lighter” (i.e., cheaper to brew). Not surprisingly, loyal Schlitz drinkers hated the new brew and sales plummeted. This double-whammy of ill-conceived corporate decisions all-but-destroyed what had been one the top selling beers in the US and served as a textbook example of how to run a prosperous company into the ground. (Still, Coca-Cola didn’t learn the lesson from the Schlitz debacle when they launched New Coke in 1985.)
This always gets brought up; however, Ayds was around long before the disease and from what I remember*, it was already on the way out when AIDS become well enough known that it would have affected sales.
- Mom tried the candy when I was a teen, so, sometime between 74 and 79ish.
Also I read a lot of women’s magazines at the time, and ISTM that the amount of advertising went down (noticed because I rolled my eyes whenever I saw the ad.)
TLDR; ayds the diet candy was dieing before AIDS the disease was well known
Because it wasn’t a threat. This was abundantly clear to anybody in a position of authority who had any sense, general knowledge of the world, or just wasn’t a pompous ass. Once a number of people failed that assessment they had to use their authority in a lame attempt to make it look like an important matter by continuing to escalate the unwarranted state of alarm. In 10 other cities the authorities displayed no apparent fear of cartoon characters on the loose.
During the 1980s, Anheuser-Busch tried to challenge junk food giant Frito-Lay by launching its Eagle Snacks brand of chips, pretzels, and crackers. However, despite a considerable amount of money spent to secure supermarket aisle space and an ad campaign featuring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman from The Odd Couple, competition from Frito-Lay and the many regional brands turned out to unexpectedly formidable and Eagle struggled to get a steady share of the snack food market. So, in 1992, A-B started a new ad campaign featuring “Face”.
Reaction was not positive to say the least. Viewers found the character creepy and sales took a dive. Not long afterward, Eagle Snacks disappeared from supermarket snack aisles so quickly, they didn’t even have any “discontinued product” sales to get rid of the existing stock. They were literally there one day and gone the next leaving empty shelves that grocers had to suddenly fill.
What was that commercial where a block of cheese was talking back to the guy?
It’s not often that an advertising campaign makes it all the way to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, but that’s what happened when Ford wanted to use famous singers in one of their campaigns. Among the singers who turned Ford down was Bette Midler. The ad agency then hired an amazingly good vocal impersonator who did a near-perfect version of Midler’s Do You Want to Dance. Midler sued, and the case went through several courts before finally being decided in Midler’s favor.
Unlike the Streisand Effect, the cost of fighting (and losing) the lawsuit, combined with the negative reaction among Midler fans, wound up costing more than Ford than the minor publicity the company received from an unexciting argument over business law.
I remember Eagle Snacks. Anheuser-Busch’s idea was that their employees were already in supermarkets weekly to stock beer, so why not have them stock snacks at the same time? The weird thing to me was that they weren’t able to find anyone to buy the business, even though it had a substantial share of the snack business.