18 Awful Ads By Surprising Companies

When persuasion doesn’t work, try baffling incompetence.
18 Awful Ads By Surprising Companies

Effective advertising is pretty straightforward. Explain why and how your product solves a problem, creates value in a person's life, or makes them feel good via tasting good, looking good, or addressing a physical need. Or just make it so owning it or using it makes people want to have sex with you, that usually works, too. It's not too difficult.

However, some ad geniuses try to make it difficult with wacky ideas like making TV dinners aggressively manly, that fast food burgers are worth killing others in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, how that eating their hard candy was like prison rape, or explaining how buying this specific floor cleaner can prevent pedophiliac sexual assault. None of what you just read was made up, these ads actually happened.

Here are those ads and other ones that went out of their way to stupidly promote their products the most ridiculous, offensive, or ridiculously-offensive ways possible.

It's clever to use suicide in beauty branding right? nappier hair, for dark anatomicals or peachy fair head peach shampoo feeiing for suicidal o compl
Coke, somehow, tried to cash in on apathy. -1010 A Diet Coke commercial with Gillian Jacobs has her basically shrugging and saying do whatever. She
18 Awful Ads By Surprising Companies
For Subway, choosing sandwich toppings is as wild as anything. MAKE ITEIC Their Make it what you want ad shows people playing music in the back of a
To poke Ford about its aluminum cars, Chevy set a grizzly bear loose. In Chevrolet's ad, a grizzly is released into a cement room with test subjects,
CPA Canada tried to make CPAS look like rock stars. They ran a commercial claiming that, actually, CPAs do cool things like saving the environment and
Kraft's Crave brand is the frozen food for wannabe tough guys, apparently. In an ad, a spokesman brags that Crave is here to grab the frozen food ais
18 Awful Ads By Surprising Companies
Checkers Drive-In said its 99c burgers were fuel for human hi-performance. In the '90s, Checkers had an animated campaign with Fast and the Furious-
Penguin floor cleaner used child prostitution to sell cleaning products. Their ad shows a businessman with a bulge in his pants paying a schoolgirl -
18 Awful Ads By Surprising Companies
Target associated plus-size women with manatees. add to registry add to list Mossimo Women's uS-Size Kimono Maxi Dress Assorted Colors 12 reviews $22.
Would you murder to keep your butt clean? Toletta thinks SO. GET YOUR OWN Their ads shows women killing each other in public restrooms over $3 toilet
Land Rover tried to make folding car seats with a phone app look adventurous. To advertise its app for rearranging car seats from anywhere, they had B
18 Awful Ads By Surprising Companies
Jolly Rancher thought prison rape would sell candy. JOU ranci GET BUSY SUCKING OR GET BUSY DYING! A tweet that stayed up for a weekend had a blue cand
Belgian comedy magazine Humo ran a 9/11 ad in 2004. Back when the site of the World Trade Center was still an empty lot called Ground Zero, Humo tried
In Germany, chocolate company Ferrero ran a white-nationalist-like: ad. YES WEISS SANE E Their ad for a new white chocolate spoofed an Obama rally, wi
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