If a company wants to stand out, it’s important for them to make bold choices. Their products and advertising must be memorable and appealing to customers. Because anyone who says all publicity is good publicity has never endured a PR dumpster fire.
Redditors have been recalling the worst PR disasters of all time, so we’ve gathered their best stories below. From giving cars offensive names to rolling out commercials that should have never seen the light of day, these companies have made some incredibly questionable choices. So enjoy scrolling through these PR nightmares, and be sure to upvote the ones that you can’t help but laugh at!
#1
We Are All Leo Messi. Messi was impliciated in tax fraud and got found guilty in Spain. His team, F.C. Barcelona, started the campaign we are all leo messi, in his support. Because we’re all really good at soccer, get paid s**t tons, and exploit the economic system. When you make 22.6 million dollars a year without endorsements. Just pay your f*****g taxes. I do it and I get paid like 7.50 an hour.
Image source: calcio7, Josep Tomàs
#2
Pepsi started a marketing campaign in Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan “Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation” came out as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead.”.
Image source: Hotman_Paris, slava
#3
Some years back, there was an incident where a Greyhound passenger went crazy and beheaded another passenger.
Greyhound had just rolled out an ad campaign titled “road rage? You’ve never heard of bus rage”.
It was very quickly, very quietly pulled.
Image source: Ratfor, Loco Steve
#4
There is this department store in Brazil that had put in their TV ads ‘buy anything you want for the price you want’ and some guy decided to buy a bunch of expensive stuff and said he was willing to pay only 1$. The store said he couldn’t and then he proceeded to sue the company and eventually won the lawsuit. They removed it from TV.
Image source: anon, Italo Melo
#5
Probably Mars Ice Cream, a couple of decades ago, in the UK.
They planned an entire month’s summer campaign on Capital Radio, starting in June. When the ‘trigger temperature’ reached 21 degrees C, all these promotions, competitions, give-aways etc etc would kick off.
So the Capital DJs were announcing the imminent start of the great ice cream event and….
It was cold and rainy. For week after week after week. In fact, the mercury stayed stubbornly below 21 degrees for the entire time the campaign was supposed to run, and it never kicked off at all.
Moral – don’t rely on the British weather as the lynch-pin of anything.
Image source: MisterShine, Bianca Ackermann
#6
The Swedish PR firm Locum spelling their name without a capital “L” and with a heart instead of an “o”.
Image source: viktorlarsson, Jeferson santos
#7
Last year, Nestlé tried to make an #AskNestle hashtag happen on Twitter in Germany. The questions they received included: “why are you letting children starve?”, “why do you support child labor?” and “why do you hate the rain forest?”. Guess that didn’t turn out too well for them.
Image source: BonScoppinger, Saroona1989
#8
Australia has had Uber here smashing taxis so the taxi guys tried to respond with a twitter campaign #yourtaxis trying to get people to tell their fantastic taxi stories.
It did not go well.
People just flooded it with their terrible taxi stories.
Image source: BorisBC, Life Of Pix
#9
I remember there was a PR guy who did a press conference for a new computer. When that was a big deal.
After praising the heck out of the current model, he uttered the words, “And next year’s model will be even better!”
So the buying public decided enmass to wait for next year’s model. Which never came because there were no profits from the current year.
Image source: CanadianJogger, Mikael Blomkvist
#10
The Balloonfest ’86.
Basically what happened was the United Way of America tried to break the world record for most balloons released at once by releasing 1.5 million balloons as a harmless publicity stunt. What they didn’t realize was that what goes up must come back down. The falling balloons cause millions of dollars in property damage, the deaths of a few fishermen, difficulties in air navigation, and preumably a ton of wildlife killed.
Not only did they get negative publiciy and lawsuits, the balloons caused an *actual* disaster.
Image source: anon, AS Photography
#11
When ariana grande was caught licking a donut (it wasn’t hers, it was on the counter) then she made an apology video talking about the rise of obesity in America lol. She also caught alot of heat for being really rude to the lady behind the counter.
#12
Nestea had a promotion 5 years back where in every 12 pack they had a coupon for a free 12 pack. As soon as the kids in my town caught wind of it they brought as many cars as possible and just bought 6 cases, dumped them in their car, took the coupons, got 6 more cases, and so on.
Nestea is my favorite drink of all time so as soon as I heard about it (maybe 4 hours in) I checked every major store and they were clean out. I eventaully found a bunch of diet nesteas in a random shoppers and still made a decent haul. People got creative with the literal hundreds of cans of nestea, I built a throne. Still can’t believe this s**t acutally happens.
Tl;dr infinite Nestea.
Image source: thebull6ix, Nothing Ahead
#13
Apple automatically putting U2’s new album on everyone’s phones.
Image source: rhydons, cottonbro studio
#14
Gerald Ratner. It’s a well known story, but I’ll tell it for those who haven’t heard it before. He owned a chain of mass-market jewellers in the UK, and in 1991 got up on stage in front of a crowd of other businessmen and said:
>We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, “How can you sell this for such a low price?”, I say, “because it’s total c**p.
He then said that earrings the company were selling were as cheap as a prawn sandwich but that the sandwich would probably last longer. It should be said for context that the chain wasn’t exactly renowned for quality – people knew that what they were buying wasn’t particularly good quality, but Ratner almost appeared to mock his own customers. Customers then ditched the chain en-masse, losing Ratner millions of pounds, and the business almost collapsed. It survives to this day as H Samuel and Ernest Jones.
Here’s the speech in full, with the relevant bits at 3:45 and 5:58.
Image source: cragglerock93, Institute of Directors
#15
That time that Burger King released a 6 second ad with the “OK Google, what is the whopper burger?”. This triggered any nearby Google devices to give a description of the whopper burger, except that it got the info straight from Wikipedia, so people just went to the Wikipedia whopper page and changed the information to say things like “contains children” and “contains traces of cyanide”.
Eventually Google just said f**k it and made the ad not work with Google devices anymore if I remember correctly.
Image source: Haineserino, Ismail Hadine
#16
In 1993, Pepsi ran a contest in the Philippines promising one million pesos ($40,000) to whoever found the number 349 on their bottle cap. But they accidentally made 800,000 winning caps. The mistake led to death threats against Pepsi executives and nationwide outrage.
Image source: Mercuryn, Gökçe Gök
#17
VW and their f**ky diesel emission situation.
Image source: anon
#18
Two years ago, the Pittsburgh Penguins decided to do a Q&A session on Twitter involving James Neal, a skilled player with….well, let’s say that he’s not exactly known for fair play. He has a history of borderline and outright dirty play, including cross-checking opponents in the face, elbowing them in the head, and also an incident of kneeing an opponent in the head.
Sample questions from various hockey fans:
* James, do you get the biggest thrill out of kneeing someone in the head or cross checking them in the head?
* Do you make rocket noises when you launch yourself at peoples’ heads? if not, why?
* Do you think before cross-checking people in the head or is it just pure instinct?
* If you opened a bar how cheap would your shots be
* what part of the stick should I be holding to really lay a good cross check to someone’s head?
* If a tree falls down in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does James Neal still cross check it in the face?
* what favorite memory have you robbed from one of the players you kneed to the head?
* A train leaves NYC traveling at 97 mph, another train leaves LA traveling at 76 mph, when do you headshot the child riding coach?
* if you could go back in time and play with any player in history, which one would you knee in the face?
* if you were holding a baby and dropped it on its head, would it already be unconscious from your previous elbow to the head?
* James, my roommate stole my food. should I lunge at his head, elbow him in the temple or drive my knee into his skull?
* If the moon was made of BBQ Spare Ribs, would you still leave your feet to charge at it?
* when you go into a corner and there are 3 people, and you only have 2 elbows, how do u decide which one gets kneed?
Image source: anon, Michael Miller
#19
The Union Street Guest House (hotel) threatened to levy a $500 fine against customers who left a negative Yelp review. Then the internet found out. Hundreds of people proceeded to spam their Yelp page with negative reviews. They’re no longer in business.
Image source: BassingTrains, Andrew Neel
#20
A Philadelphia Pretzel shop opened up in our neighborhood and thought it would be funny to hand out marketing/advertisement papers that looked like Philly parking tickets on one side. So the neighborhood woke up to find their cars littered with tickets and everyone had a meltdown of rage. People stormed over to their car ripping the ticket out of their windshield – only to find it was a joke. The other side was an advert to the new pretzel shop. Man, did that shop get it. Calls, threats, screams – you name it. I don’t know how they stayed in business, but it was a rocky start.
And for anyone not familiar with the region, the area this happened in has overly crowded street parking – so people are already SUPER stressed out about parking cars, too limited parking places, etc. Targeting the parking situation was a bad, bad move. Any other joke would have been fun – this nearly incited murders.
Image source: NomNom_DePlume, Max Avans
#21
I can’t believe noone has said Wyclef Jean yet. Six months ago, he did an AMA on Reddit, on the the 20th anniversary day of The Score – the second album by his hip hop group, The Fugees.
In 2001, Wyclef set up a charity called Yele Haiti to raise funds for the ruin that Hurricane Jeanne left in its wake. the organization, however, was plagued by corruption, unpaid debt lawsuits and allegations of mismanaged money. Wyclef himself was accused of not filing tax returns from 2005 through 2010, and it was reported that over half of the millions of dollars raised was used for transport and food for the top brass, and to line the pockets of the upper echelon in the organization. Yele Haiti shut down in 2012.
Man…Reddit K**LED him. He deleted his d**n account halfway through the AMA. Bad, bad idea. I don’t know how his PR team ever signed off on it.
Image source: srinivas-seshadri, Matt Johnson from Omaha, Nebraska, United States
#22
KFC decided to give out free chicken for one day as part of a promotion. Obviously, however, you have to play it safe with your advertising when doing something like this. If you give out all of your product for free, then that’s a loss but you still want people to be aware of it. So you should advertise it on a talk show that will be viewed but not by everyone. So, who’s this Oprah Winfrey chick? She’s just a niche thing, right? Let’s advertise it on her show.
The results are pretty much what you would expect.
Image source: Flashpenny, Karolina Grabowska
#23
Susan Boyle had an album release party. The PR company came up with the hashtag #susanalbumparty.
Image source: markedmo
#24
The mountain dew promotion that let people on the internet come up with names for the new flavor and then allowed voting for the favorite. If I remember correctly the top submissions were “squirting granny” and “H****r did nothing wrong”. Don’t trust people on the internet.
Image source: mough, Erik Mclean
#25
That starbucks campaign where they made the baristas have conversations about race with their customers.
Image source: anon, opengridscheduler
#26
When the game Burnout 2 (3?) came out, The game was big about driving on the wrong side of the road, crashing and general law breaking. So they had a campaign where you could send in your speeding tickets, and they would pay them for you. Oh boy, did the police get annoyed at that one.
Image source: SuperRoach, Kindel Media
#27
The clumpies ice cream near my house had fliers made one year and the person who made the fliers left the “l” out and I gues no body noticed Until it was to late,there were fliers that said cumpies icecream all over the place.
Image source: eatyoureyeballs
#28
Martha Coakley running against Scott Brown for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat. After being criticized for not running an enthusiastic enough campaign as Brown continued to close the gap between them she responded…
“What do they want me outside Fenway park shaking hands in the COLD!?”
A shot at Brown who was doing that very thing a few days before. She proceeded to lose the election and Massachusetts had it’s first Republican Senator since 1979.
Image source: D1Foley
#29
Cigarette companies trying to spin the benefits of smoking.
Remember when they tried to convince us that smaller infant weights were a preferred thing? Or that smoking was healthy? Every time they turned their PR engine on, stupidity and arrogance poured out.
Image source: NomNom_DePlume
#30
There was a maintenance place called Dieseltec that wanted to jump on the “we wont serve gays” bandwagon a year or so ago and it blew up miserably.
By the end of it, people had found out that none of the mechanics were licensed, the business wasn’t licensed or registered because the owner “doesn’t believe he has to”, his brother is a registered s*x offender against children, and that he was convicted of beating his wife.
He then trashed his own place, put it online saying “the gay liberals did it” and tries to start 3 separate gofundmes that all got shut down. Oh yeah, he was also illegally using fortune 500 company logos on his displays and claiming to be a licensed dealer for those parts. Then literally all of those companies told him to remove all logos and parts from his stock or else there will be legal actions.
Tryna cash in on dumb bigots, literally f****d his entire business.
Edit: Just decided to peruse their FB page where it all went down while taking a dump, and mysteriously every post related to it has been removed. Gee, I wonder why.
Image source: Wampasully, cottonbro studio
#31
New Coke.. that was nasty.
It happened when I was a kid and had the metabolism to down super big gulps of coke. I think my 42 year old body would go into shock if I tried that s**t now.
If you do not know, Coke changed their flavor to some mix between pepsi and horse p**s.. it did not work well, that is why coke has “classic” written on the bottles still.
Image source: rChewbacca, adrigu
#32
That Jägermeister pool party. They put liquid nitrogen in the pool which created some awesome fog. Problem was it displaced a lot of oxygen and also reacted with the chlorine in the pool. One person went into comma when it was all said and done. I don’t think anyone died.
Image source: Vapeguy, cottonbro studio
#33
The GTX 970. At first people were wondering why the GTX 970 started to give them degraded performance in titles that used more than 3.5 GB’s of Vram. People thought that Nvidia just made a mistake and that a software update would magically “solve the problem”.
Nope. Turns out the GTX 970 has Two blocks of memory one being 3.5 GB’s of fast V ram and the other 512MB of the 4GB V ram was a LOT slower(1/5 the speed).
This was a huge shock because all those people who bought GTX 970’s for an SLI config to completely crush 1440p and 2160(4K) titles basically got swindled. The GTX 970 is very good, but only in the first 3.5GB. After that you’re basically s**t outta luck.
Apparently there was a “miscommunication” between the PR and the Development department and Nvidia as a company got burned HARD for it. They ended up settling for paying $30 to every GTX 970 owner on the lawsuit and yeh. Nvidia DEFINITELY screwed up on the GTX 970 because it was literally one of the most widely used cards for it’s price bracket.
Image source: deathaddict
#34
In Australia, our supermarket Woolworths has the slogan: ‘We’re the fresh food people.’
On ANZAC day (basically a memorial day for our fallen troops) they tried to do a promotion called ‘Fresh in our Memories.’
It did not go down well.
Image source: anon
#35
Michael Phelps vs a Shark! Who will win?!
That s**t got so hyped and not once did they listen when somebody said that a computer simulation was of course going to fail to satisfy.
Image source: RadleyCunningham
#36
Acclaim, video game company, once tried to advertise on tombstones. They said it might appeal to poorer families.
Image source: cosmoceratops
#37
The unveiling of XBox One wasn’t exactly a high point in Microsoft’s PR history.
Image source: barra333, Sergiy Galyonkin
#38
I thought of another one: the launch of *SimCity* (the recent remake). So they decided on some horrible combination of DRM and online-only play. Cut to launch day when the servers were jampacked and everyone was getting “lol you can’t join the server” messages, but couldn’t even play the game as a sandbox because it *had* to be online-only at the time, if they could even get on to get past the DRM.
EA eventually got it under control, but only after a lot of people abandoned the game, and eventually they had to put in a sandbox mode so people could play the d**n game without being tethered all the time.
And again, it’s *SimCity*, not *World of Warcraft*. Their dreams of some MMORPG-style version of the game were wildly afar from what most people (that I know of) wanted from the game.
#39
I went to a university where the mascot was a Pronghorn deer. We got a new gym and sports complex so to open it they made a mascot costume and, to make it seem like the largely disinterested student body was involved, put the naming of the mascot to a vote.
Of course “H***y” won in a very public, automated online voting process.
The BoD came out a few days later and announced the name was “prongers”.
This was announced at the first game in the new venue and came out to loud boos.
Edit: despite what they told us at orientation, the Pronghorn is not an antelope.
Image source: RandomActPG, Reiley Costa
#40
The reign of former United CEO Jeff Smisek:
1. He was there for the merger of United and Continental, but never merged the contracts for the pilots / flight attendants, leaving the entire staff disliking the guy. He is also blamed with taking people’s pensions, and making a bunch of people relocate to Chicago and then laying them off.
2. On top of that, at the beginning of every flight he would have a video of himself talking about how great UA is… the comments from the flight attendants are hilarious.
3. Started cheapening the food in international first / business. My favorite is their old Champagne, “Chateau de Jeff”
4. Jeff lied to Cleveland and closed their hub anyways. This was a big reason United merger was approved.
5. One of Jeff’s underlings was caught trashing elite members, which caused a lot of very high frequency flyers to leave.
6. Jeff eventually got fired for bribing some guy in Jersey. He got fired, and paid like 10,000,000, its good to be jeff.
Image source: ooo-ooo-oooyea
#41
[NBC’s management of the Tonight Show](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tonight_Show_with_Conan_O%27Brien#Mentioning_of_O.27Brien_on_Leno.27s_Tonight_Show) when Jay Leno “retired,” Conan took over, then 6 months later NBC was like “jk! Giving it back to Leno! Lolz” In the lead up to his final days as a Tonight Show host, Conan was able to use the show as a platform to very directly bash NBC.
NBC ended up having to pay Conan $45million to leave and he created the “The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour” before moving to TBS.
Image source: swooot
#42
I don’t know if we have any wrestling fans here, but the way the WWE handled the Chris Benoit fiasco was pretty insane.
On the weekend of June 22nd 2007, professional wrestler Chris Benoit strangled his wife and son and then committed s*****e himself. Benoit (a long-time, widely respected veteran of the business) had told the WWE that he needed to go home because his son was coughing up blood (he missed three house shows). He m******d them over the course of the weekend and took his own life at the end of the weekend.
Benoit reached out to friends (to be discovered after the deaths) upon committing s*****e and eventually was discovered by cops on the 25th, the following Monday. The WWE found this out that Monday, around 4pm (and this is when this story gets crazy).
Now at this time, one of the big WWE stories was that (the week before on Monday Night Raw) Vince McMahon had been “blown up” and “k**led” at the tail end of the broadcast. The show on the 25th was going to be a kayfabe memorial show in honor of Vince McMahon.
Immediately after finding out about Benoit (on the 25th), the WWE and McMahon decided to break character and host a tribute/memorial show to Chris Benoit. The WWE was not aware that it was a m****r-s*****e.
Shortly after the three hour program DEDICATED to Benoit and what he meant to the wrestling community, it came out what had REALLY happened, and the WWE moved as quickly as possible to distance themselves from Benoit and scrub him from their history.
It was madness.
Image source: anon
#43
Watching it again, it doesn’t seem that bad at all, but I saw Howard Dean’s scream live on TV when it happened. My husband and I looked at each other and said, “That’s it for him.” And it was. Amazing.
Image source: jlgra
#44
Via Rail Canada.
They promised a student pass for Canadas 150th, for $150.
Becuase Trains are so d**n expensive, when the sales went live, the site crashed. Only a small amount of people got tickets, and Via Rail said that was it, no more.
Followed by a massive up roar, they re opened selling the tickets at 3am Pacific7am Atlantic. While in the process of selling these, 4000 people managed to get tickets, but Via Rail said only 1867 (year Canada was confederated) would get them.
Around 2000 people didn’t get the tickets they had originally purchased, and were refunded. Followed by another uproar, they were charged and given their tickets back.
Train travel in Canada is extremely expensive, and many people (much like myself) who want to see the country, but can not affird to fly, or drive, tried to take advantage of this opportunity. The prices were too low and the demand was way too high. I don’t understand how Via Rail did not see that coming.
Image source: ialo00130
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