DailyDirt: Advertising Mistakes; Hilarity Ensues

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Advertising is a tricky business. Not only do you not know where half your marketing budget goes, but it's possible to waste 100% of your advertising with an innocent mistake. It's tough to try to make funny and catchy ads, and not everyone has the same sense of humor. Here are just a few examples of some ads that have backfired.

• Automatically serving ads without a human editor to judge the appropriateness of the content can be a really bad idea -- especially when placing ads on news items. Yahoo News recently inserted ads for Express clothing on a news photo -- unfortunately the photo pictured a distraught man who survived an attack by Taliban militants. [url]
• KFC ran a commercial in the UK a few years ago that set a record for complaints -- because viewers thought it encouraged bad manners and mocked people with speech impediments. This commercial has held on to its record to this day, but there probably aren't many agencies vying for the title. [url]
• Pizza Hut knows its customers love pizza, but does a love of pizza correlate with disliking math? This commercial needs to show its work on how it arrived at its conclusion. [url]
• Kenneth Cole is trying to raise "awearness" with some edgy ad campaigns. But one of its billboards generated some backlash from teachers when it suggested that teachers' rights were at odds with student interests. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: ads, advertising, awearness, backlash, commercials, marketing, mistakes
Companies: express, kenneth cole, kfc, pizza hut, yahoo