8 Real Ad Campaigns Straight Out Of The Bowels Of Hell
Marketing campaigns try to invoke those big-ticket, money-making emotions like joy, nostalgia, or a crippling sense of worthlessness. But one emotion they usually steer clear of is mind-torquing terror (that is, unless the campaign is for a horror flick or a presidential election). But, like all of us, even the savviest of Don Drapers will sometimes just plain ol' shit the bed.
Rocket Raccoon Goes To Japan, Gets Possessed
Like all good Internet explorers, we here at Cracked have come across some quirky Japanese gadgets in our time. This one is worth noting, and this time, it's for reasons other than making us feel confused and ashamed. This clip brings the lovable scamp Rocket, of Guardians Of The Galaxy fame, out of the realm of film and injects him straight into your nightmares.
Meet Furry Krueger.
Raccoons are fairly innocuous in the real world. In Guardians Of The Galaxy, they're heroic wiseacres. And in the alternate galaxy of Japanese animatronics, they're dead-eyed demons that make tanukis (aka Japanese raccoon dogs who possess giant magic testicles, duh) look normal. We can't decipher what exactly Rocket is saying to the interviewer, but when something holding a gun is twitching spasmodically like so, it's probably better not to know.
We'll just assume he's describing the contours of his scrotum in painstaking detail.
King Cake Baby Is The Terror Of New Orleans
After the blood has been cleaned off, babies are pretty cute. Even the ugly ones are described as such, since nobody wants to get on the bad side of the woman who just spent hours struggling to dislodge a wrinkled hobgoblin.
"Hey, I think that guy's handing out beads WHAT NO WURRRRRGGHHH."
This terrifying toddler was constructed for Mardi Gras as a mascot for the New Orleans Pelicans NBA team. Its bib might say that it hearts king cake, but its eyes say it would love to eat your soul.
Anyway, a king cake is a special pastry made for Mardi Gras with a plastic baby figure baked into it. At some point, the weird tradition of eating a baked plastic baby for good luck was translated into making a giant wide-eyed plastic baby who's wearing a diaper so huge that a small child could crawl in there and take a nap. Make no mistake: This diaper is for show. It will contain no feces, ever. The baby only farts, and those farts are the whispers of the damned.
Any daycare that thing tried to enter would immediately be quarantined and set on fire.
It turns out the sculptor behind King Cake Baby wasn't given any real instructions or designs. The people in charge wanted a king, a jester, and a king cake baby, so he had free rein to bring to life any horrifying creation he could imagine. What the NBA probably didn't realize was that this guy and his family have been making creeptastic parade floats and sculptures for generations. Oversized sculptures are his shit, and then they deliberately threw a baby in the mix.
Every dollar that cheerleader makes for the rest of her life is going straight to therapy.
The King Cake Baby, like so many other terrible ideas, has really taken on a life of its own. No longer confined to being a carnival tradition to clear out basketball stadiums after the game, it's been popping up in shops and television stations around New Orleans. That just goes to show there is no way to stop this toddling despot. After all, children are the future.
Coors Light Leaves Metallic Briefcases Around City Like That's Not Going To Be A Problem
The modern world is on such high alert that scientists have been scrambling to find a more alarming color than red to indicate just how screwed we are. We dance along the fine line between preparedness and paranoia every day. Backpack? Could have a bomb hidden in it. Big jacket? Could have a concealed weapon. Big hat? Could be hiding a dangerously poor haircut. Homemade clock? Yeah right -- thanks for the free bomb; now off to jail with you.
Briefcases were once the domain of high-powered business executives and salespeople, but now that nobody has a job, they've become synonymous with bombs. Hollywood has even updated their tropes to follow suit. Briefcases are no longer used to carry outrageous amounts of cash; instead they're for technological whizzes to wire explosives into. Especially shiny metallic ones, like the kind Coors Light left all around Toronto, because being a sadist is a requirement in producing Coors Light.
Nihilism is the requirement for drinking it.
Coors had attached the suspicious briefcase to a streetcar stop in Toronto as a "search and rescue" contest, assuming somebody would be delighted to have a look inside despite the fact mothers now tell their children "curiosity killed the civilian." When it was brought to the attention of the Toronto Transit Commission, they did exactly what any level-minded person would do in that situation; they directed traffic away from the supposed promotional item. It was a necessary precaution. After all, that box could have had light beer inside it.
Good for putting out fires or helping an athlete pass a piss test, but that's about it.
Coors brought the "adventure to an end" that evening and gave a polite, "Sorry for terrifying you with our poorly thought-out marketing campaign" to the people of Toronto. Next time, they have assured the public their advertising campaign will be less alarming. They've settled on a group of masked people shooting pedestrians with water pistols filled with Coors Light.
A similar situation happened in Australia when the video game Watch Dogs was released. Canada and Australia are like chalk and nails, so it's natural their incident was even more intense. A black safe was delivered to a reporter with a note stating, "Check your voicemail." Since nobody has actually left a voicemail in five or six years, the reporter had no message to check. Office staff decided to try to enter a pin code taped to the top of the safe, and lo and behold, the thing started to beep. It came across like a bomb, and the stunt went down in much the same way.
Because "check your spam folder" just didn't sound terroristy enough.
Too Many Chocolate Mannequins
"If Michelangelo had constructed David out of chocolate, would somebody be gross enough to nibble off his nipples?" It's the eternal question that has plagued art critics for generations, and finally we have an answer: almost certainly.
As part of a promotion for TV network UKTV, a sculpture made of 500 Belgian chocolate bars was built in the likeness of British star Benedict Cumberbatch. Here's how the British public responded:
"So? This would be my exact same reaction to a real Cumberbatch."
Arm-licking and thigh-kissing were also popular choices. Some twisted Benedict fans even took a finger home to fulfill a sweet, chocolatey fantasy.
To be fair, "chocolate Sherlock glove handjob" is the plot of at least 60 percent of Tumblr fanfic.
And that's not even the most disturbing chocolate figurine we're going to show you today.
Please take note of the nutty deposit bulging beneath the wrapper.
Under the direction of the creative head of Chanel, this creepy chocolate being was ripped from Willy Wonka's wet dreams by fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. It's part of a hotel suite made entirely of chocolate, but the star feature is undoubtedly this edible likeness of model Baptiste Giabiconi, which presumably screams when you eat it.
Oh Look, A Commercial For Pay Toilets
At the risk of creating controversy, public toilets are bloody gross. They're a creepy collection of waste holes that are used only in desperate situations. The closest thing to a positive emotion they create is a sense of queasy intrigue at how the human anus can imitate a shotgun. In one commercial, German company Sanifair attempted to make their pay public toilets more welcoming, and in the process just made them all-new kinds of creepy.
Everybody who clicked on this video will die in seven days.
For one thing, our tour guide is an overly enthusiastic little girl -- so there's a bad start. Good-hearted adults know better than to follow an unaccompanied tween into a bathroom. With a big, bold grin on her face, she bounds into the toilet, eager to find what's around each corner. "I'd like a closer look at that" is never something you want to hear around an excrement-collection facility.
She actually skips around the place, because in Germany a visit to public bathrooms is as close to whimsy as it gets. She remarks with delight how she can use "Daddy's credit card" to pay, which makes it sound like Deutsch Kinder roam free on these kinds of porcelain-exploring adventures so regularly that their parents have to foot the bill.
The Hershey squirts feel doubly good when combined with a 30 percent APR.
Whoever did the English dubbing here is blatantly fucking with the audience. "What happens next is real magic" is a phrase the ad bandies about, but the camera then shows she's talking about the amazing self-cleaning, no-touch flushing toilet. We shit you not, she exclaims, "I'm a magician!" as she makes the floating feces disappear. The ad ends with ice cream, as all public toilet commercials are wont to do.
"Soon, this will become dung and my quest beings anew!"
Salad Restaurant Unleashes Army Of Underwear Men
After years of praying to the Weather Girls, the dreams of generations of '80s music fans finally came true when it started raining men in Beijing. Clad in gear inspired by Sparta and the famous Battle of Thermopylae, dozens of white guys descended on the Chinese capital with one goal in mind -- espouse the virtues of the all-glorious salad.
"Four of us are going to have to change."
The mock soldiers assembled as part of a promotional campaign for an organic salad home-delivery service, because the only way to get people to buy a salad is burly men holding swords to their throats. The caped-and-sandalled warriors carried around cups of salad to show off the product, and crowds of people gathered around to see what on Earth was going on. Part Calvin Klein models, part Game Of Thrones cosplay, the legions of salad soldiers created such a stir that authorities were forced to get involved to deal with these time-traveling warriors.
The police claimed they were forced to crack down on the promotion after a number of complaints. A few Spartans really stuck to their characters and refused to yield, but, instead of being immortalized, they were just arrested. By the end of the day, the Salad Spartans were just like the rest of their Greek compatriots: half-naked and without a job.
Like Thermopylae, this is a result Sparta should have seen coming.
Academy Award Nominees Transform Into Unsettling Oscar Statues
Celebrating Academy Award nominees is nothing new, but one British movie theater with only good intentions managed to erect the creepiest Benedict Cumberbatch statue since a few paragraphs ago. This particular theater thought it would be a good idea to erect statues of Cumberbatch and his fellow nominees to celebrate their great Oscar nominations. Unfortunately, the statues didn't come across as intended, but instead made the theater look like they had murdered their heroes and embalmed the bodies.
Fanatical in the worst kind of way.
Cumberbatch stood alongside Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, and Rosamund Pike in front of the theater, in case the people of England forgot what the biggest stars of film in the country looked like naked and without genitals, like The Four Eunuchs Of The Apocalypse.
A budding actress decides it's time to dream of a new career path.
Subway Is Obsessed With Making Bread Statues Of Athletes
Subway, God bless them, is not in a good spot spokesperson-wise. Thankfully, this is not the time to talk about Aredjay Oglefay. Instead, let's look at what Subway does when they a get a hold of a strapping, healthy athlete to shill their sandwiches. Here's Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Mariota:
Pictured here with more food than he'd eaten in the past three years.
Apparently Mariota has eaten so many vegetables, his body has now been absorbed by the Food Pyramid. All that is left of him is his head, which sprouts from a bed of Subway's freshest ingredients. The Food Frankenstein cannot speak, but its eyes plead for the abyss.
Here's another of their best: a BBQ chicken structure made in the likeness of Robert Griffin III:
It's more structurally sound than his knee.
Subway is apparently attempting to build a formidable army of athletic sandwich men, but each of their creations serves only to terrify customers more than whatever other fast food could do to their insides. Even the stars themselves go a little bit insane over the sculptures. Subway mummified Ndamukong Suh in pepperoni, and he was so aghast he resorted to cannibalism.
"Usually the face mask stops me from doing this to other people."
There doesn't appear to be any end in sight for Subway's sandwich soldiers, so make sure to staple a lettuce leaf to your front door for the inevitable vegan Passover. Hopefully by then companies will understand that creating statues in the likeness of stars comes across more Norman Bates than Michelangelo.
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