5 Famous Marketing Stunts That Turned Out to Be Lies

5 The NBA Fining MJ for Wearing Air Jordans

The Stunt: In 1984, Nike signed Michael Jordan and created new sneakers around him, which they called Air Jordans. The shoe was white at the bottom but primarily red and black. That meant that it violated the NBA’s dress code, which said all sneakers had to be more than half white. The league said they’d fine Jordan $5,000 every time he wore the shoes during a game, and Nike decided to pay the nominal fine each time and let their guy go on wearing them.

That’s a fun bit of lore. There was a movie last year, Air, all about Nike signing Jordan, and it made sure to include this story. It had to, as it didn’t cover a terribly dramatic conflict, so it needed to list all the shoe and MJ trivia it could. 

The Truth: When the preseason began in 1984 and Jordan walked onto the court in red-and-black shoes, Nike hadn’t yet finished making their Air Jordans, which would be called the AJ1s, or “Breds.” Jordan instead wore an earlier sneaker, the Air Ship. These Ships were the sneakers the NBA objected to. The NBA objected to the red-and-black scheme, not to any red-and-white shoe that narrowly fell short of the 51 percent white rule. If the NBA ever fined Jordan, they fined him for the Ships, not for the AJ1s, and we don’t have evidence that they actually fined him at all. 

Eagle-eyed fans looked through game tapes and concluded that Jordan never wore red-and-black Breds during a game, not even once. Once the season began, he wore red-and-white Ships or red-and-white Breds. He wore red-and-black Breds once during the 1985 All Star Slam Dunk Competition, which wasn’t a regular game and wouldn’t be subject to fines, and one photo from there caught a lot of attention:

But he never wore red-and-black Air Jordans when playing. And yet, Nike sold them using the story of the ban. You see, the ban wasn’t some obscure bit of backroom dealing that was uncovered years later by shoe historians. Nike told the world about it in an Air Jordans ad broadcast to millions. 

The ban wasn’t an obstacle that Nike savvily circumvented so they could show off their shoe on the court in a campaign. The ban was the campaign. When it came to the shoes being worn on the court, viewers at the time couldn’t be depended on to even identify them. And as for the shoes that really were banned, the black Ships, Nike didn’t care about them and quietly killed them off. 

4 The Glass Strong Enough to Protect $3 Million

The Stunt: You might have seen photos from the following 2005 campaign in your feed, because it goes viral again every year or so. 3M (the company famous for Scotch tape, and also other stuff) put up a display at a Vancouver bus stop, storing a bunch of money behind bulletproof glass. They had evidently stuffed $3 million there — 3M dollars, which is pretty clever. 

They were so confident in the strength of their glass that they left all this money in a public place with only their product protecting it. People tried breaking in, as photos showed, but no one succeeded. 

The Truth: The display didn’t contain $3 million. It contained $500, layered on top of many stacks of prop money. Even if 3M did believe in their product, using that much real money would have been unwise and unnecessary, involving all sorts of extra complications and security every step of the way. 

That’s not to say this stunt involved no security. A security guard monitored the display. He encouraged onlookers to attack but only in a limited fashion: They could use their feet and nothing else. So, all your fantasies about approaching the display with a saw under cover of night never stood a chance at coming true. Even with people limiting their approach to kicks, they managed to weaken the frame, suggesting the glass would soon pop out. For this reason, the installation was taken down after just one day. 

So, was this a bad product then, if it was unable to withstand a day of kicking? Not really. The product being demoed here wasn’t really bulletproof glass. 3M doesn’t manufacture glass. The product is Scotchshield security window film, an 8-millimeter-thick layer of sealant. It somewhat strengthens glass, but 3M doesn’t claim it stops burglars, just that it slows them down. The main benefit is that when glass breaks, the film holds the shards in place, preventing them from flying and injuring people. The film also blocks UV rays.

If that’s the product, you might say it’s misleading to call it “security glass” and portray it as securing $3 million. We won’t accuse 3M of misleading anyone, though, because 3M never ordered this display. The client was one obscure Vancouver retailer, which is why the ad includes a local phone number, something ads for billion-dollar multinational companies rarely do. 

The store hired an advertising firm, who put the whole stunt together for just $6,000. The 20 years of media reports on the campaign’s boldness came at no extra charge. 

3 Quiznos’ Quest for Proper Meat

The Stunt: In 2006, Quiznos ran a campaign where they said their Prime Rib Philly Cheesesteak had more than twice the meat of Subway’s. This was true, based on each sandwich’s specifications, as the Quiznos sub had 5 ounces of meat, while the equivalent at Subway had 2. But since you never know if a franchise will exactly comply with specifications, the company sent mystery shoppers to stores to buy sandwiches and weigh the meat. When a store sold a sub with less than 4.5 ounces, Quiznos kicked them out as a franchise. That’s how you know Quiznos’ assurance means something. 

The Truth: Most of the franchises who failed the test were allowed to go on operating, even if they included just 2 ounces of meat. Quiznos sent termination notices to 300 franchises but gave every store who responded (which was almost all of them) another chance — with one exception. This was the store run by husband-and-wife duo Richard Piotrowski and Ellen Blickman, and it appears that Quiznos shut them down in retaliation because they were planning to hold a press conference complaining about the mystery shopper scheme. 

Both parties sued, and we’re going to defer to the judge on this. “This whole charade of ‘terminating’ and ‘defaulting’ franchisees who failed the field test was just that — a charade,” he ruled, “driven not by Quiznos’ genuine concern about whether its franchisees were making sandwiches to spec, but rather by its overriding public relations desire to be able to proceed with its national advertising campaign targeting Subway.”

The judge ordered Quiznos to pay the couple $350,000 plus legal fees. In the meantime, the couple had shifted to running their own independent sub shop, which went out of business. They’d have to console themselves with knowing that over the next decade, 90 percent of Quiznos franchises would also go out of business. 

That was because franchises had to buy expensive ingredients (from Quiznos itself) and sell food at corporate-mandated low prices. Profits were never high for franchises, and they went especially low during the Great Recession. Quick note for those of you who don’t remember the last recession: A recession isn’t when people order so much food at restaurants that restaurants successfully jack up their prices. It’s when people can’t afford restaurants anymore and the restaurants go bust. 

2 Bruce Willis’ A.I. Likeness

The Stunt: In 2021, Willis appeared in an ad for MegaFon, a Russian telecom company. He didn’t act in a studio to make the ad, but he appeared in the ad anyway, thanks to deepfake technology. He had sold the rights to use his face in exchange for a couple million dollars. 

The story resurfaced the following year, after we learned Willis has aphasia and was retiring from acting. While we still recoiled at the whole concept, it was slightly more understandable when an actor was losing the ability to use his image in the traditional way.

The Truth: Willis never sold his likeness, nor did he authorize its use for free. A Russian company just stole it and made an ad from it, because no one could stop them.

The world knows about the ad, not because some international correspondent leaked it but because the company publicized it internationally. This company wasn’t MegaFon (who had no interest in anyone outside Russia knowing about the ad), but the deepfake company who made the ad, a company known as Deepcake. They shared footage of the deepfaking process, getting American news agencies to share it and to falsely report Willis had authorized it. 

Many news reports about the ad took the tone that they were reporting the dark implications of the technology. But in sharing clips designed to show off the power of neural networks, they were providing free advertising — not for MegaFon, but for Deepcake and for deepfaking in general. 

1 The Power of Subliminal Advertising

The Stunt: The ultimate form of stealth marketing debuted in 1957. It was called subliminal projection, and it meant that if a single frame in a video showed off a product, you’d want to buy it, even if you’re never aware you saw the image. The classic example was a movie theater, which subliminally flashed the words “Drink Coca-Cola” and “Eat popcorn,” resulting in more patrons heading to the concessions counter.

The concept excited and terrified the public. Congress considered passing legislation to ban subliminal advertising. Advertisers looked into the technology, and here’s a 1958 ad from Chevrolet, poking fun at it. But in poking fun at it, they’re still using it, as surely as Deadpool making fun of product placement is still getting paid by Honda. 

The Truth: Subliminal projection does not work. Scientists who’ve studied this haven’t been able to get it to work, and neither have advertisers. It’s why, today, movie theaters will instead advertise concessions using the far more effective method of showing you popcorn as clearly as possible.

There are some benefits to advertising to people without their knowing you’re advertising to them (such as through subtler types of product placement), but you need to see images long enough to perceive them for them to persuade you. Even those ads with “hidden messages,” like a sex act hidden in an ice cube, need the message to appear more than for a subliminal length of time. Otherwise, you’ll never take them in, whether consciously or not. The above Chevy ad, as you’ll see, doesn’t actually use subliminal imagery — it flashes the car long enough for you to see it, and it tells you what it’s doing. 

Marketer James Vicary was the guy who claimed to have done the Coke-popcorn experiment. Not only has no one been able to replicate his results, but skeptics realized he had to have falsified them because the theater he claimed he used was too small for the number of moviegoers he claimed to have studied. Then an investigator went to that theater, and they said no experiment like that had ever taken place there. 

In 1962, Vicary admitted he’d not done all the research he’d claimed. He said he’d wanted to do more, but some info about what he was doing leaked out too early, so he went public early.

Vicary’s goal in all this was sales — and not of popcorn. He was trying to attract clients to his own marketing firm. “Maybe it would help business,” he said, and it did. He personally made some $4.5 million from advertisers hiring him for his expertise after he told the world about his subliminal research. 

They hired him, but they never ended up using subliminal frames in their ads because they discovered the damn things didn’t work. We'd be more angry at him, but if there's anyone who deserves to be deceived by advertising campaigns, it’s advertisers. 

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