Many people hated those “Have a happy period” commercials made by the Always line of feminine hygiene products. I honestly appreciated them, because that was the brand I used for the last decade or so that I needed them, and trust me, had they been available sooner, my periods would have been a lot less unhappy.
Don’t get me started on the 25-year-old American phenomenon of prescription drug advertising. The drugs advertised are becoming more exotic by the day; don’t you think your specialist already knows about it?
The most recent ones I’ve been seeing are totally without any information whatsoever. “Ask your doctor about ‘Genuflect.’” That’s the entire commercial. One of them had Whoopi Goldberg sitting in a chair, she said the line, the end. WTF?
Whenever I hear about Schlitz Beer, I always remember my college classmate who got her first degree at a different Midwestern college, where she lived in the dorm with one of the heirs of the Schlitz fortune who presumably couldn’t get into Harvard or Yale. She remembered this girl constantly calling her parents and screaming at them to send her more money.
And I just found out that the Uline Company, which sells various office and janitorial supplies, is an offshoot of the Schlitz fortune, founded by the Uihlein family (get it?). They have good products, but you have to order at least $300 to get the free shipping they promote, and I’ve heard they are awful to work for.
BTW, I don’t know if you care, but the owners of Uline are big-time donors to far-right conservative candidates (gift link to a New York Times article).
ISTR having heard that, which especially makes sense because they’re located in Wisconsin.
I get their catalog, but have never ordered anything from it.
A correction: the Eagle Snacks “Face” ad campaign didn’t start until around 1995.
TIL Bud Light had a slogan, “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night #UpForWhatever”.
Um…
Pepsi seems to have a track record of advertising blunders and missteps. Remember the Pepsi points campaign of 1996-- where you could collect Pepsi points every time you bought a Pepsi, and redeem them for t-shirts, sunglasses, or even a Harrier Jump Jet for 7,000,000 Pepsi points. Haha, no one’s going to drink 7 million Pepsis! Except, someone read the small print- you could buy Pepsi points for 10 cents each. So he lined up investors, bought 7 million Pepsi points for $700,000, and demanded his jump jet.
I don’t think it was really injurious to the Pepsi brand-- if anything it may have gotten them a goodly amount of free publicity, and the resulting lawsuit fizzled out in court. But I bet there was egg on a lot of ad exec’s faces, and I imagine some heads rolled over it.
And then the judge called him an idiot and tossed the case:
No eggs, no heads rolling, that campaign was a huge success. The really bad campaigns are barely remembered because they didn’t increase exposure or sales.
But as long as we’re dumping on Pepsi, let’s throw in the infamous Michael Jackson commercial.
In a similar vein, there’s the engineer who figured out how to take advantage of a Healthy Choice promotion to earn 1.25 million air miles by buying 12,150 individual cups of chocolate pudding. The promotion awarded 500 air miles for every 10 UPC codes sent in from a Healthy Choice product, with double miles for those who redeemed them within the first month. David Phillips figured out that the cheapest product he could buy were individual pudding cups at 25 cents each. Ultimately, he was able to turn $3,000 worth of pudding into over $150,000 worth of air miles.
That one was brilliant! Loved it. (I also like the Moon.)
Not sure if you intended to write “employees” as opposed to “dedicated customers.”
I have a BIL who was an electrical engineer for AB for 20-30 years starting around 1980. When he started, my impression was that they were somewhat casual about drinking on the job. He described them having a cooler full of beer in the engineering offices. As I recall, there was some expectation that employees would drink only AB products. I remember BIL was previously a PBR guy, but after he married my sister, my folks stocked Bud and Mich. As years went by, they cut down on the drinking at work. I believe they gave employees coupons or something for a case or 2 every 1 or 2 weeks.
BIL left right after the InBev takeover.
That really happened? I remember that as a plot point in the Adam Sandler fim Punch Drunk Love
Uh, I did acknowledge that rather than being injurious to Pepsi, it probably resulted in a lot of free publicity for them.
But huge success? I imagine that if you’re the ad agency in charge of a campaign for a huge client, and that campaign goes so sideways that it results in your client being dragged into a lawsuit, some execs who were in charge of that campaign are going to be sacrificed. Regardless of the fact that said client ultimately prevailed in the lawsuit.
Yeah, I remember that one too. I also remember a story of an ordinary guy who figured out how to beat the system with a credit card company-- I don’t remember the specific company, but it was in I think the early 90s when credit card companies were coming out with a number of kooky ideas to try to get ordinary people more in debt. This person’s credit card offered a line of checks that they freely sent, so you could write a check against your credit line, and offered something like 2% cash back with every check written. The idea being that most people would build up a big carryover credit debt with an APR % that would way more than make up for the cashback gimmick.
But the guy simply wrote out checks to himself for thousands of dollars, paid off the balance every month, and pocketed all fo the cash back amount. He kept getting mail from the credit card company thinking “uh oh, it’s probably a cease and desist letter” but it was for more checks. He ultimately squeezed a few grand out of the credit card people before they finally wised up.
I remember reading a critique of the campaign in Ad Age or somewhere like that and what stuck with me was the the brief was that the spot was meant to build excitement for the entire Nissan lineup. Yet the only car they showed was a remote control model of a car that was long in the tooth and well understood to be either exiting the lineup shortly or about to be replaced with an updated version.
I guess the point of the ad, lost on about everyone, is that they were trying to establish Mr. K. as the exciting, eccentric force behind Nissan’s creativity. Except beyond the hardcore Datsun/Nissan fans, he was not well known already, the ad didn’t help in that regard, and there was not a whole lot of excitement in the Nissan lineup to begin with.
Yes you did. I was pointing out in general how that is missed in some responses but you did understand how that works.
I’m pretty sure it didn’t go that way. Pepsi maintained it’s relationship with BBDO where the campaign originated for 11 more years after that. It’s not like they did had done anything illegal and the follow up publicity was just free advertising. Now had that lawsuit not gone their way (an actual impossibility based on the law), well in that extraordinary circumstance, and costs not covered by insurance were substantial, then yes eggs on faces, maybe a head or two doing a slow motion roll out the door, but it’s not always a career killer.
Reminds me of the group that hijacked McDonald’s Monopoly game pieces.
I know it happened at the old Blitz-Weinhard brewery in Portland. They had a taproom where employees could stop off for a free brew or two at the end of the shift before getting into their cars and driving home. Finally a local paper ran a little exposé about this practice and they supposedly put a stop to the practice.