The 10 Worst Advertising Fiascos of All Time -- Starting With Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods' wife Elin finally decided to divorce the golfer, according to People, after she saw his mawkish ad for Nike (NKE) in which he is lectured by the voice of his dead father. As such, the commercial -- widely reviled by the public as well -- must now take its place as No. 1 in the list of the 10 Worst Advertising Fiascos of All Time:
10. The World Wildlife Fund's Sept. 11 Commercial It was only created so that it could be entered into a competition, and very few people saw it during its actual paid media run. But as soon as it became known that the WWF had approved an ad which re-enacted the destruction of the World Trade Center with 100 times more planes, outrage ensued.
9. Aqua Teen Hunger Force's Boston Bomb Scare In a guerrilla marketing stunt gone wrong, the ad agency for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim brands placed electronic boxes on bridges and other structures around Boston, triggering a false terrorism alert and shutting down parts of the city. Two agency employees were arrested.
8. Taco Bell's $42 Million Chihuahua "Yo quiero Taco Bell!" was a huge success for the restaurant chain ... until it realized that the dog mascot it was using belonged to someone else. Who sued. And won.
7. Hoover's Free Flights Promotion Britons couldn't believe their luck when Hoover began offering a return trip to the U.S. for any customer who spent just £100 on any Hoover item. So they bought vacuums by the truckload ... and the promotion cost Hoover £48 million.
6. The Tropicana Redesign To be fair, it wasn't widely known that consumers really, really liked the familiar orange on the Tropicana juice box which has served that brand for years. Then PepsiCo asked the Arnell Group to redesign the package and all hell broke loose. The company was forced to revert to the original packaging.
5. The Just For Feet "Kidnap" Ad Somehow, nobody at the shoe chain or its agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, stopped to ask whether a commercial showing a black Kenyan runner being kidnapped, drugged, and then forcibly given new shoes by a white hit squad, might be racist. They figured that out after the spot aired on the Super Bowl. Lawsuits followed.
4. Pepsi Sets Michael Jackson's Hair on Fire DDB wrangled the biggest living pop star to shoot a soft drink commercial in 1984, and then sent him to the emergency room.
3. Ketchum PR Exec Uses Twitter to Insult Fedex It was the Tweet heard round the world, from the days when not everyone understood what Twitter was. A Ketchum PR exec got off the plane in Memphis to meet with his client at Fedex, and posted: "True confession but i'm in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say 'I would die if I had to live here!'" Fedex employees were enraged, and the tweet became a global scandal, forcing a series of ritual apologies.
2. Volkswagen's Suicide Bomber Ad It's supposed to be a joke about how tough the Volkswagen Polo is, but the ad -- which shows a terrorist failing to blow up his car -- is simply a racist riff about Arabs.
1. Nike's "Did You Learn Anything?" Ad featuring Tiger Woods Wieden & Kennedy drew unwanted attention to the golfer's sex scandal and the spot was the final straw for his wife, who decided she wanted out when she saw it.
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