🤯 INCRÍVEL: “It Melted”: 30 Memorable PR Fails That Really Could Have Been Avoided 😲
Sometimes, very well paid executives can gather in a boardroom, go through multiple focus groups and meetings and some up with an absolutely terrible idea. While often not that fun to experience, they can be a blast to witness at a distance.
So we’ve gathered examples from a viral thread of the most poorly thought out publicity stunts out there for your daily dose of schadenfreude. Get comfortable, prepare to wonder “what were they thinking?!” with more and more intensity, upvote your favorites and be sure to share your own thoughts and examples in the comments below.
June 2015: Sure Donald, you can be a Republican Party candidate! *snicker snicker* This’ll be a fun two week campaign.
March 2016: My god what have we done…
During the 1984 Olympics McDonald’s ran a deal kind of like their monopoly game where if the USA won a medal in an event you would get free food. Well, the biggest competition, the USSR, boycotted these games. Resulting in a massive medal haul for the USA.
It was a while back (pre-internet) but an airline did a promotion to get couples to book flights together. They thought it would be a good idea to send flowers to the same household of the man that booked the flight. Turns out it exposed a bazillion extra-marital affairs.
The Crush train collision.
In 1896, the Katy Railroad did a publicity stunt where they invited the public to watch a head-on collision of two trains. They had upgraded all their locomotives and tried to sell off the old ones, but still had extras left over. A railroad employee (appropriately named William Crush) came up with the idea of crashing them head-on for a crowd to watch.
They set up a special track to do the collision and sold $2 train tickets to spectators who came from far and wide to witness the crash. They expected 20,000 people to attend, but got more like 30,000 to 40,000. After police forced the crowd back to a safe distance, each train backed up 2 miles, and the crews cranked the trains up to full throttle, jumped off, and let them go.
Of course, back then the trains used steam engines. Steam engines work by boiling water to create incredible pressure, enough pressure to pull a 500 ton train up a hill, for example. So basically they are like explosives waiting to go off. Engineers were sure the boilers wouldn’t explode, but they did, sending metal shrapnel into the crowd, taking lives of 2 or 3 people, and injuring more, including a photographer who got a flying bolt through his eye.
Ironically, the Crush train incident happened in/near the city of West, Texas, the same small town where a massive fertilizer explosion happened in 2013.
The Balloon Boy Hoax.
A family let a huge flying saucer shaped helium balloon, loose, then claimed their six-year old son was missing and must have climbed into the balloon. It was national news. The Denver Airport was closed down and National Guard helicopters were used to search for the balloon. When it was found, the boy was not inside, and the family reported that he was really hiding at home. When the boy was interviewed that night for TV and he was asked why he did it, he said “for the show”.
When the boy explains that they did it “for the show”, both parents become visibly uncomfortable and frantically start backpedaling to try to cover up that the story was fake. Never in my life have I felt such secondhand embarrassment.
10 Cent Beer Night. The baseball game where fans predictably got wasted and caused so much trouble that the Cleveland Indians had to forfeit the game.
The Discovery Channel hyped a live special EATEN ALIVE in which survivalist Paul Rosolie would be eaten alive by a wild Anaconda wearing a camera through the entire ordeal. He stated he would literally enter the “belly of the beast.”
2 problems.
A. They couldn’t find a wild Anaconda to eat him during the live broadcast.
B. The raised in captivity Anaconda wasn’t really that hungry and basically nibbled on the guy for a while and Paul Rosolie gave up mid-meal.
The whole thing was a major disaster.
AAirpass, the lifetime plane ticket! Sold for $250k, and those buyers could get 1 additional “companion” ticket for $150k. A deal for the passenger, as an “internal study reportedly concluded that each passholder caused losses of about $1 million per year to the company”.
Snapple tried to to make the worlds largest popsicle in NYC out of their new flavor of tea. Before they could even get it upright for the Guinness rep. to measure it, the popsicle melted. Sanitation workers spent hours trying to hose away the melted popsicle.
For their comeback tour in the 00s the Spice Girls asked people to send in suggestions as to which city they should play one of their concerts.
The top voted city was Bagdad, Iraq.
They never followed through.
Hoover Europe decided in 1992 to clear a backlog of vacuum cleaners and washing machines in the UK, by offering two free airline tickets with every purchase over £100, firstly to Europe and then later to the USA.
They were *inundated* but they hadn’t realised the uptake would be so high…
It cost the company £48m in tickets and compensation and precipated the sale of the business to Italian manufacturer to Candy.
Knott’s Berry Farm (an amusement park in California, close to Disneyland) and KIIS-FM (top-40 radio station) teamed up for a fundraiser for a local Boys & Girls Club in 1999 that hilariously backfired. As a co-promotion with Rick Dees (the morning DJ), KBF had a “Cinco Dees Mayo” event where they would only charge 5 cents admission and donate the proceeds to the Boys & Girls Club. Everyone of the main decision-makers severely underestimated the interest this would generate, thinking that since May 5, 1999 fell on a Wednesday, there wouldn’t be too significant an increase in attendance. Maximum capacity was reached by 10am and the park had to close its gates with several thousand people outside still trying to get in. Fights erupted, bottles and rocks were thrown, and the city’s police department was overwhelmed. 200 police officers and sheriff’s deputies in riot gear were bused in to quell the disruption. Most of the local schools reported unusually high absentee rates that day, depriving them of much-needed ADA funding. KBF reimbursed the city police for the mutual-aid response, which came to over $13,000. The total donation to the Boys & Girls Club was $10,000.
The Dan vs Dave Olympics of 1992 Entire ad campaign by Reebok that pitted the two U.S. decathletes against each other as to who would do better in the Olympics
Dan failed to qualify.
Not sure if this counts but I used to work at a chain restaurant that offered half price pizzas for Valentine’s Day a few years back, but as take out only. We had a line out the door, dozens of furious customers and somehow ran out of pizza dough before half the orders were even completed. I have never seen so many angry customers.
DIVADS anti-aircraft system.
In February 1982 the prototype was demonstrated for a group of US and British officers at Fort Bliss, along with members of Congress and other VIPs. When the computer was activated, it immediately started aiming the guns at the review stands, causing several minor injuries as members of the group jumped for cover. Technicians worked on the problem, and the system was restarted. This time it started shooting towards the target, but fired into the ground 300 m in front of the tank. In spite of several attempts to get it working properly, the vehicle never successfully engaged the sample targets. A Ford manager claimed that the problems were due to the vehicle being washed for the demonstration and fouling the electronics. In a report on the test, Easterbrook jokingly wondered if it ever rained in central Europe.
I’d say the New Coke thing, but others would argue they had that planned the whole time to revive fallen sales when they brought back Coke Classic.
Walker’s (The brand name of Lay’s in the UK) ran a promotion for a few weeks where you got a code on a pack of their crisps (chips), and if you predicted correctly that it would rain somewhere in the UK on that day (you chose the location) you got £10. Needless to say, they cancelled it soon after due to the money losses because: 1. It’s the UK, rain is a fact of life and 2. The weather forecast is something that exists.
Update: After some researching, the minimum bet was 40p (the price of a packet of crisps) for one of around 20,000 squares over a 3 hour time period, with a 25-fold return at odds of 1 in 8. Contrasted with the UK’s national lottery at 1 in 57 to win £10. Shows you just how stupid this campaign was.
In 2003 Red Lobster did a promotion for “All You Can Eat Crab Legs” and it almost bankrupted them. I remember when they did it. My wife and I went and they ran out of crab legs and had to offer vouchers for later. It was crazy. The president of the company ended up having to step down due to that.
1986 The Cleveland United Way planned to release 1.5 million balloons as an attempt to break a world record..needless to say this being Cleveland things did not go as planned….”in 1986, organizers with United Way of Cleveland thought they had the perfect idea to generate a little publicity and create a beautiful spectacle in the process. With a crowd of volunteers working all hours, they filled 1.5 million helium balloons, and released them all at once. Unfortunately, they had no idea the terrible consequences they would unleash by doing so, and their tragic mistake led to 2 casualties and millions of dollars in damages through lawsuits.” Google for full story,it turned into a chaotic mess.
John McCain “suspending his campaign” in the 2008 presidential race due to the collapse of the stock market.
It was meant to show how seriously he took the situation, but the problem was that there was nothing he could actually do to fix the situation as a candidate. So he just started campaigning again a few days later… it was quite a strange scenario.
Competitive Cyclist teaming up with Strava to give you free bucks for every hour you rode your bicycle.
They shut the program down less than a month in after they saw how much they’d actually have to pay out in store credits.
Rita Ora when she said she will release her new album if she got 100,000 retweets.. Think she got about 4000 then continued to tweet she was hacked and won’t release new albums until she’s ready.. Still makes me cringe so much to this day hahaha.
There was a guerilla marketing campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force in Boston post 911. Someone reported seeing a shady person who left a conspicuous box near a bridge, so the police were called in and they blew it up. Turns out it was just a box of stuff for the marketing campaign. I think Cartoon Network was fined $2M for it.
The “This isn’t your father’s Oldsmobile” ad campaign. It really hurt the brand’s reputation, and they never recovered. It’s one of the main reasons they don’t make Oldsmobiles anymore.
There was a online vote for where Justin Bieber would go for his “My World” tour. As one might expect it was hijacked by 4chan leaving the top two positions as:
1. North Korea with 659,141 votes.
2. Isreal with 625,110 votes.
The Montreal Canadians tweeting images of new followers twitter handles on the backs of their jerseys.
Trolls joined in and got all sorts of offensive handles tweeted on Canadians jerseys. This is made worse by the fact that the Patriots did the same twitter stunt with the same results a couple of months earlier.
Sony had a streak of bad publicity stunts with the PSP.
First they had some artist make graffiti promoting this handheld system but didn’t ask permission of the building owners to use their wall.
Then they hired a marketing agency to make a fake viral blog with posts about the PSP to give the impression that it’s not corporate and owned by normal teens. It went viral all right, for the wrong reasons.
Finally not so much a stunt but an ad with some good intentions but badly executed- a billboard showing a white woman putting a black woman in a submissive position (this was to advertise the new white PSP). People cried racism. What made it more ridiculous is there was a complementary billboard with the positions of the women reversed, but nobody said anything about that.
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