Marketing Misfires & Ad Armageddon
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #150 ❤️
This week we’ve been inspired by a dubious Heinz ad (more on that in the bonus) to bring you a rundown of the top five worst marketing campaigns that backfired big time.
From a terrifying stalker car to a not very well thought out deal on air miles via graveyard billboards.
Let’s get into it.
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#1 - Fiat – Too Much Latin Loving
The Fiat 500 is a classic Italian car, bringing to mind narrow streets, romantic drives, and Latin lovers.
So, in 1994, they obviously thought what better way to gain publicity and advertise the launch of the Fiat Cinquecento (500) in Spain than by sending anonymous personalised love letters to 50,000 Spanish women. What could possibly go wrong?
The letters were all written on pink paper, and read –
“Yesterday we saw each other again. We met on the street and I noticed how you glanced interestedly in my direction. I only need to be with you for a couple of minutes, and even if it doesn’t work out, I promise you won’t regret our little experience together.”
These 50,000 women were obviously thrilled. Just kidding, they were terrified, and rightly so. Some stayed in their houses for days, one was too scared to leave the house unless she had her brother with her, and another asked her family to conduct a private investigation.
The original plan was to send out a second letter in six days revealing the letter was from Fiat, but this was scrapped and replaced with an apology letter and a brochure inviting them to take a look at the car in dealerships. The women laughed and laughed and all bought Fiat 500s. Again, just kidding.
This publicity stunt caught the attention of Social Minister Cristina Alberdi and there was public outrage, ending with Fiat being fined by the High Court of Zaragoza and sued by one woman.
The campaign was apparently aimed at “the independent, modern working woman.” Just the type of women who don’t want to be stalked by a lovestruck hatchback. Actually, that’s all women isn’t it.
#2 - Shadow Man 2 – 2 Spooky 2 Furious
Back in 2002 a video game none of us have ever heard of decided to push the boundaries of bad taste, deciding that advertising in graveyards would be a cool idea.
Now if you thought that was bad enough, it gets worse, as the game’s production company Acclaim Entertainment offered to pay relatives of the recently deceased in return for some real estate on their headstones. You know, like when people drive cars with ads pasted all over them, but about a million times worse.
They actually said, publicly, that the offer might “particularly interest poorer families”. Classy.
One spokeswoman for the company, which bills the game as a "journey to the Deathside", said that as it was a “dark, gory type of game… we thought it was appropriate to raise advertising to a new level."
Another spokesperson said that while they appreciated that people may find the offer offensive, some might actually see it as a good way to get a “subsidy to burial costs to give their loved one a good send-off” and assured horrified onlookers that it was not a cynical media stunt, rather an act of charity with some marketing thrown in.
The game itself is described as "fierce and gruesome", with the player taking on the role of a New York policeman with a “living dead” alter ego. Very fitting…
The game obviously went on to become a huge hit, the new Lara Croft or GTA. Not.
#3 Healthy Choice – Always Do The Maths
American food brand Healthy Choice lost out big time back in the day with what they thought was a cute little promo stunt offering airline travel miles.
Participants could earn up to 1,000 travel miles to the airline of their choice for every ten product barcodes mailed back to the company, seems like a great way to get some attention by giving out a few air miles and sell a lot of stuff in the meantime.
Enter David Phillips, civil engineer, and math genius. David really, and we mean REALLY wanted to travel with his family, and figured out that if he could get cheap enough products from Healthy Choice he could make this air miles thing work for him.
So he set out to look in discount stores for Healthy Price products and struck gold with pudding cups which cost 25 cents apiece, each with a separate barcode. He bought them all up, and even asked the store selling them to order entire pallets of the stuff for him to buy.
With barcodes from more than 12,000 of these pudding cups, at a total cost of $3,140 ― Phillips cashed in on more than 1.2 million miles.
In the 17 years since he earned his airline mile fortune, Phillips has traveled to 43 different countries, and taken his family, friends and even coworkers to spots around the world, including Italy, Nicaragua, Austria, Aruba, the Netherlands, Korea, Colombia, Cambodia and Dubai.
The lesson to be learned here: when offering prizes, always do the maths on ALL potential outcomes.
#4 - Holiday Inn – Bad Hotels And Worst Taste
For some unimaginable reason Holiday Inn thought the best way to advertise a billion dollar upgrade campaign across their hotels was an ad spot during the 1999 superbowl which compared their makeover to that of a transgender woman at her high school reunion.
In yet another shocking display of marketing bad taste, the TV ad shows a beautiful women walking through the room at her high school reunion while a voiceover lists all of her various surgeries and their cost.
As male classmates ogle the woman, the narrator says, verbatim:
“New nose $6,000, lips $3,000, new chest $8,000… It’s amazing the changes you can make for a few thousand dollars”.
As one of these classmates flirts with her, his face drops as he realises she was formerly a male classmate of his named, of all things, Bob Johnson. The narrator then concludes:
“Imagine what Holiday Inns will look like when we spend a billion”.
While this is, objectively, shocking, at the time Holiday Inn were pretty pleased with themselves. Despite having to pull the ad after just a few airings, the Holiday Inn Exec VP-Chief Marketing Officer congratulated himself for having only spent two million dollars on TV time but gaining ten million dollars in publicity.
They only had to alienate an entire demographic and anyone who morally supports them to get it.
#5 - Pepsi – Who Wants To Be A Gazillionaire
Another competition gone terribly wrong, this time with household name brand Pepsi and a contest launched in the Philippines giving customers the chance to win a million pesos.
This stunt went so wrong that it literally has its own Wikipedia page, which sums up the fiasco as so:
“Pepsi Number Fever, also known as the 349 incident, was a promotion held by PepsiCo in the Philippines in 1992, which led to riots and the deaths of at least five people.”
The competition worked wonders for the brand at first, as they desperately tried to find a place in the market next to Coca Cola, sending sales skyrocketing, everything went swiftly downhill after an error plunged the country into chaos.
The premise of the competition was simple – bottle caps featured numbers which were drawn like lottery numbers, with the holder of a certain cap number becoming the next millionaire.
Until one fateful day when number 349 was called, and Pepsi realised that they had released not one, not two, but 800,000 bottle caps with the number 349 on them. Theoretically, these bottle caps were cumulatively worth 32 billion US dollars.
Thousands of Filipinos rushed to Pepsi bottling plants to claim their prizes, and after an emergency meeting of PCPPI and PepsiCo executives the company offered 500 pesos ($18) to holders of mistakenly printed bottle caps, as a "gesture of good will".
Many irate 349 bottle cap holders refused to accept PCPPI's settlement offer. Forming a consumer group, they held rallies outside PCPPI offices and while most protests were peaceful, a teacher and a child were tragically killed by a homemade bomb thrown at a Pepsi truck, followed a few months later by the death of three PCPPI employees at the hands of a grenade thrown into a warehouse.
PCPPI executives also received death threats, and trucks across the country were targeted, damaged and even burned.
In the end, legal action was brought against the Pepsi company, with very minor amounts being paid out in damages to the plaintiffs.
We reckon most people in the Phillipines prefer Coke nowadays.
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
Heinz – What’s The Point?
We saw the ad that inspired this week’s newsletter shared on LinkedIn recently.
The ad features images of restaurant workers filling Heinz bottles with generic sauces, with the slogan “Even when it isn’t Heinz, it has to be Heinz”.
The person who shared this ad on our feed, who we will of course not be calling out even if we do think they’ve completely missed the point, praised it as branding at its best.
We tend to agree with one commenter, who noted that what this ad actually seems to be saying is - 9 out of 10 people can’t tell the difference between Heinz and something cheaper.
Seems like marketing guys just patting themselves on the back, as it says nothing at all about the product, if not that it’s not even that good.
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